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SOME DISTINGUISHED 
AMERICANS 



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SOME DISTINGUISHED 
AMERICANS 



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Books by 
HARVEY O'HIGGINS 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 
THE SECRET SPRINGS 
FROM THE LIFE 

HARPER & BROTHERS 
Established 1817 



Some 
Distinguished Americans 

Imaginary Portraits 



BY 

HARVEY O'HIGGINS 

Author oj 
"the secret springs," "from the life," etc. 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 



iS" 






Some Distinguished 
Americans 

Copyright, 1922 
By Harvey 0*Higgins 
Printed in the U. S. A. 

First Edition 

H-W 



OCT "4 1922 



©CI.AG86069 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Henri Ant^ok ^ .^ 3 

II. Big Dak Reilly 47 

III. Mrs. Murchison 87 

IV. Warden Jupp 136 

V. Peter Quale 179 

VI. Dr. Adrian Hale Hallmuth 227 

VII. Vance Cope 261 



SOME DISTINGUISHED 
AMERICANS 



SOME DISTINGUISHED 
AMERICANS 

I. HENRI ANTHON 

"For Anthon is to American art what Poe is to 
American literature." 

— J. Sydney Bartle, in International Art. 



WHEN you see Rome and the dome of Saint 
Peter's, you are supposed to say to yourself: 
"Oh, of course! Michelangelo!" And when you 
see Saint Paul's in London, you know that you are 
looking at a memento of Sir Christopher Wren. 
But when you see the sky line of New York and 
the towering white Broadway Building, do you 
cry: "Ah! Henri Anthon!" Do you? Certainly 
not. 

Do you even know that this sacred Fuji-yama of 
Manhattan is Anthon's monument? No. Nor do 
any of the thousand other enthusiasts who have 
etched it, painted it, photographed and sonnetized 
it, reproduced and glorified it in every medium of 
artistic expression. Yet it was Anthon who first 
brought the Broadway Building into the oflfice of 
its creator — on the sheet of a scratch pad, if you 

13] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

are to believe Anthon's account of it — and asked, 
carelessly: "How about that?" 

The head of the firm took it. He just took it, 
as Anthon has described the scene — ^just took it, 
and no more. 

"Yes," he said, after a moment. "That has pos- 
sibilities." He pulled his ear, studying it. "De- 
cidedly," he said. "Decidedly. Yes. I could make 
something of that." And Anthon went back to his 
drawing board in the drafting room, smiling 
secretly at the secret gleam in the architect's eye. 

Anthon has explained that he smiled secretly 
because the Broadway Building was a joke to him, 
and he had foreseen that his famous employer 
would take it seriously, and his famous employer 
had taken it seriously. So has everyone else from 
that day to this. They have none of them sus- 
pected the humor of it. Yet, according to Anthon, 
he had said to himself: "New York doesn't build 
cathedrals to Saints Peter and Paul. It builds 
them to Saints Profit and Loss. Why not make 
the Broadway Building look like what it ought to 
be — a temple to the faith that is in us?" And 
grinning, with one eye closed against the fume of 
his cigarette, he made a quick pencil sketch of an 
office building in Gothic architecture, like a great 
cathedral gleaming white, with a tower that soared 
like a spire. He chuckled, holding it off to get its 
general effect. "Lord!" he said. "It's a go!" 

It was. He had found something that the whole 

[41 



HENRI ANTHON 



staff had been seeking. He had found a plan for 
the Broadway Building worthy of the sum of 
money to be spent on it. He had designed a monu- 
ment to himself that was destined to be as con- 
spicuous as the Great Pyramid, although his name 
is not on it, any more than the name of the Egyp- 
tian architect is on that tomb of Cheops. 

We looked at it together, once, from the deck 
of a Jersey ferryboat. 

"A sense of humor," Anthon said, "is a wonder- 
ful thing. A wonderful thing! That edifice ought 
to be called 'Anthon's Folly.'" 

He was on his way to Hoboken to take the Hol- 
land Line to Boulogne and Paris. He was as happy 
as if he were ascending bodily to Heaven. Paris 
at last! 

"Why not smile.^^" he asked me. 

I did not feel like smiling. I was thinking of 
Grace Aspinwall, who had created Anthon as truly 
as Anthon had created the Broadway Building. 
And he was certainly her "Folly." 

"Well," he said, "you always did take life sacra- 
mentally. How are you getting on.?" 

He had been crossing the ferry in a taxicab, with 
his hand-baggage and his steamer-rug. He had 
seen me inhaling the breezes on the stern of the 
boat. We had not met for years. We have never 

15] 



SOIVIE DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

met since. Yet he greeted me, and parted from 
me, as casually as if we saw each other every other 
day. We did not say a word about his past. We 
talked only of his trip to Paris. 

"When do you expect to be back?" I asked, at 
parting. 

"Never," he said, "as long as that endures," 
waving his hand at his masterpiece. "I'm afraid 
they'll find out that I did it on them. Good-by!" 
And he climbed into his taxi, grinning — little 
"Hank" Anthon, with his Parisian mustache, his 
Murger necktie, and his morality of Montmartre 
— although he had never been nearer Montmartre 
than Coney Island. 

3 

It is as if a clever landscape artist should claim 
that he had created the Alps. And, nevertheless, 
it is true, except for one vital detail. Anthon did 
not do the design as a joke. 

The proof of that fact is to be found in the seventh 
number of his Bibelot, Or don't you know about 
his Bibelot? It was a sort of amateur magazine 
which he and his wife published "every now and 
then," some years ago. He etched the designs for 
it, and she wrote the verses, and they printed it in 
their studio, at night, on a little handpress for 
which she set the type and he made the plates. 
They called it a "bibelot" because they had the 
mistaken idea that the word "bibelot" meant a 

161 



HENRI ANTHON 



booklet. It scarcely paid expenses while they were 
publishing it, but a complete set of its ten numbers, 
uncut, sold for fifteen hundred dollars the other 
day. It has become a literary curiosity. 

There is a plate in No. 7, illustrating a poem 
called "The City," by Grace Aspinwall; and in 
that plate the sky line of New York culminates in 
the aspiring episcopal tower of the Broadway 
Building. The etching was made years before the 
architect was even given the commission to design 
the building — as the date on the magazine i;how^ — 
and some one has lately quoted that fact as an 
example of some sort of occult prevision. (I think 
it was Rupert Hughes.) The truth is that Anthon 
did the etching from his imagination, fantastically, 
and then unconsciously reproduced his dream tower 
as a design for the Broadway Building, and sub- 
mitted it to his employer as a joke, unaware that 
his original conception had been serious and poetic. 

And there you have a sample of the kind of 
thing that used to puzzle us in Anthon. There was 
always a shocking discrepancy between his art and 
his personality. In his work in the Bibelot, he was 
of the school of Aubrey Beardsley, though without 
even Beardsley's mirthless humor. His subsequent 
series of "Manhattan Nights" has been hailed as 
showing a technic that is "a combination of Mer- 
yon's solid gruesomeness with Whistler's grace"; 
and a monograph in International Art has an- 
nounced authoritatively that "Anthon is to Ameri- 

[7] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

can art what Poe is to American literature." Yet 
personally he seemed to have neither purposes, nor 
ideals, nor even serious opinions as an artist. At 
one time his studio was much frequented by a 
group of painters and writers who were in revolt 
against established art — the group that afterward 
published The Free Voice — and to all the dis- 
cussions about art that were never-ending among 
them, I heard him contribute only one quotable 
expression of opinion. In reply to an artist who 
contended that art was properly "a criticism of 
life" Anthon said: "Well, why not.^ It would 
only be fair — since life is so often a criticism of art." 

Certainly, his art was never a criticism of life. 
Neither was his life a criticism of his art. They 
seemed to be entirely divorced from each other. 
And though almost nothing has been written about 
his life, and reams have been written about his 
art, I think his life was the more interesting. It 
was the more significant. And, unlike his art, it 
had a moral. 

Take his first meeting with Grace Aspinwall. 



One night, in the spring of a year in the later 
'nineties, she was crossing Madison Square, on her 
way from her work. She passed a policeman as he 
stopped to rouse a man who was asleep on a bench. 
The man did not rouse. He toppled over across 

[8] 



HENRI ANTHON 



the iron bench arm; his hat fell off and a loose 
package of drawings slid from his lap and scat- 
tered on the asphalt pavement of the walk. 

She stooped to pick them up. "He's an artist," 
she said, looking at them, surprised. 

The policeman glanced over his shoulder at her 
with an air of saying: "Well, suppose he is? A 
drunk's a drunk." 

She saw that the man on the bench was a young 
man, pale and unshaven, but scrupulously shabby, 
and manifestly not a dissipated wreck. 

"He has fainted!" she said, and she began to 
search in her hand bag for her bottle of smelling 
salts. 

The policeman straightened up and watched her. 
She was dressed in the shirt-waisted, tailored suit 
of the business woman of that day. She looked as 
trim and proper as a school-teacher. The eye of 
the law acquitted her of any predatory designs 
upon the helpless, and then relapsed into official 
indifference again, as far as she was concerned. 

She sat down beside the artist, supported him 
against her shoulder, and held the salts to his nose. 
The officer unbent to pick up the fallen hat and 
drop it on its owner's insensible head. 

The man came to his senses with a tremulous 
long breath. " What.^ " he said, bewildered. " Oh ! 
Yes. Thanks." 

His teeth chattered suddenly, as loud as cas- 
tanets. It was a chilly, misted April night. He 

[9] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

sat up and straightened his hat with a shaking 
hand, as if reasserting his right to privacy and 
independence. 

She put away her smelling salts and rose. 

The policeman resumed his beat without a word. 

She hesitated, looking after him as he went. 

She asked the man on the bench: *'Can you get 
home all right?" 

''I could," he said, hoarsely, "if the sidewalks 
wouldn't teeter." 

"\Miere do you live?" 

He thought a moment. "That's so!" he said. 
He laughed to himself, and it was a self-conscious 
laugh. "I don't need to go home." He passed his 
hand over his forehead, shoving back his hat. *'I 
a?n home." 

Wlien she sat down again, on the edge of the 
seat, turned sideways toward him, he said: "That's 
right. Have a chair." 

He had delicate features of a dark pallor, girl- 
ishly long eyelashes, soft eyes, a weak but amiable 
mouth. She ignored his facet iousness as if she 
were a trained nurse who understood the feeble 
jocularities of weakness. 

"Have you had anything to eat?" 

"I've lost my appetite. ... I lost it two or 
three days ago." 

She took his drawings from him. "You're an 
artist?" 

"Thank you," he said. 

[10] 



HEXRI AXTHOX 



She frowned. **I asked vou if vau were.'' 

"I'd be willing to leave it to you." 

*'I don't know anything about it," she explained, 
exasperated. "I'm a stenographer." 

"WeU, why not.^" he replied. "We can't all 
stance." 

She rose impatiently, with the drawings in her 
hand. "If you're vrilling to let me," she said, in 
a tone of defensive harshness, "I can get you some- 
thing to eat in a restaurant." And she added, to 
soften it: "I've not had dinner, myself. I was 
kept late — in the office." 

"Delighted, of course." He tried to get to his 
feet with an air of gallant eagerness, but his legs 
seemed to fail him. He stumbled and swaved. She 
caught his arm to steady him. "If you — " he 
gasped — "have some place — to lie down." 

"Haven't vou anv friends.^" 

He shook his head, trying to control the trem- 
bling of his jaw. 

She looked around her vaguely, embarrassed. "I 
suppose I " 

"I don't wish to boast," he said, almost in a 
whisper, "but I haven't even any acquaintances." 

"I suppose I could get a cab. My room's on 
Twenty-third Street. Near Fourth Avenue." 

He turned unsteadilv in that direction. "It's mv 
head. Not my legs. I can walk." 

She took his arm in silence. It was as thin as a 
wrist, and he was shaking continuously, either from 
2 [111 



SOME DISTINGUISHED A:MERICANS 

weakness or from the cold. They started slowly 
toward Twenty-third Street. "I'm — I'm sorry to 
refuse an invitation to dinner," he apologized, 
"but I really couldn't eat — just yet." 

His voice went hoarse toward the end of his 
sentence. He cleared his throat to pretend that 
it was not the hoarseness of exhaustion. That 
touched her. 

"Don't talk," she said. "I can give you some 
dinner." 

"Thanks." He coughed again. "Do you live 
alone?" 

Unfortunately, his tone sounded as nearly flir- 
tatious as he had strength to make it. She replied, 
flatly, curtly, defensively: 

"Yes. I live alone. My name is Aspinwall. 
Grace Aspinwall. I work in an architect's office, 
doing shorthand and typewriting. My people 
don't live in New York. I'm alone here. My 
room's in a building where there are studios, but 
it isn't a studio. I don't know anybody in the 
house, and no one knows me. I never spoke to any- 
one in the street before, and I don't suppose I ever 
will again." 

He made a deprecating sound. 

"The policeman seemed to think you'd been 
drinking. I saw that you'd fainted. Your draw- 
ings had fallen on the walk. I picked them up. 
That's how I knew you were an artist. I don't 
want you to misunderstand me." 

1121 



HENRI ANTHON 



"It would be difficult," he murmured. 

"Very well, then." She turned him east toward 
Fourth Avenue. 

He sighed. "Well," he said, in a shivering 
imitation of her manner, "my name's Henry 
Anthon. I came here, several months ago, from 
Columbus, under the illusion that I was an illus- 
trator. I arrived with very little money and I 
spent half of it the first week. I've been gomg the 
rounds of the magazine offices, with those draw- 
ings, like a beggar showmg his sores " 

"It doesn't matter," she interrupted. "You 
needn't tell me. I just wanted you to understand 
that I'm not the sort of person " 

"Pardon me," he said. "I'm physically weak — 
and financially prostrate — but I still have moments 
of lucidity. I can see that you're not the sort of 
person " 

"Very weU," she ended it. "That's all that's 
necessary." 

He glanced at her sidelong and smiled to him- 
self. She had a clear-cut profile, regular but 
severe. She could have been a beauty if she had 
given her mind to it, but she denied her charm with 
an expression of face that carried her fine features 
as if they were a weakness to be overcome and a 
temptation to be on her guard against. 

Anthon once said of her: "She's as beautiful as 
one of those Grecian temples on Fifth Avenue — 
that turn out to be savings banks." And Anthon 

113] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

always had a Bohemian pose of disrespect for 
savings banks. 

She led him across Fourth Avenue to an old 
house on the north side of Twenty-third Street. 
It had a second-hand bookshop in its basement, 
and offices and studios on its upper floors. "You'll 
have to climb three flights," she warned him, in 
the hallway. 

*'If you'll go ahead and open your door," he 
said, "I'll get up — in time." 

"No. I'll help you." 

"Please don't," he begged. "You couldn't, un- 
less you carried me." She took his trembling arm 
again. "No. Please,'^ he insisted. "Let me do it 
my own way." He leaned against the newel post, 
resisting her. 

"Very well." She ran briskly up the stairs and 
disappeared. 

He followed, step by step, steadying himself 
with a shaking grip on the banister, lifting his knees 
as if he were pulling his feet out of sucking mud. 
At the first landing he sat down a moment to get 
his breath. He finished the second flight on all 
fours. 

She saw him from the hall above, having opened 
her door, lit her gas jet, and returned to look for 
him; and she stood clutching the balustrade and 
biting her lips as she watched. 

At the second landing he collapsed. She took 
off her hat and coat, threw them into her room, 

[14 1 



HENRI ANTHON 



and hurried down to him. Lifting him to a sitting 
posture, she put one of his arms around her neck, 
gripping his wrist, and took him around the waist 
with her free arm, and raised him to his feet. He 
muttered some feeble remonstrance. She carried 
him up the final flight, in that way, silently, with a 
steady strength that was part of her practical 
efficiency. 

Her room — a narrow hall bedroom — had a studio 
couch along its wall, with the head to the one 
window. She lowered him to the couch in her 
arms, and took off his hat, and arranged the 
cushions for his head while she held him against 
her breast. And she stretched him out finally on 
his back, unresisting, with his eyes closed, twitch- 
ing and shuddering helplessly in the spasms of an 
internal chill. 

She did not stand to look at him. Flushed and 
breathing shortly through dilated nostrils, her lips 
pressed together in defiance of the conventions, she 
hastened to shut and lock the door. Then she 
set about lighting her gas stove to make a hot 
drink for him, hurried by the audible shaking of 
the couch behind her, though she did not turn to 
glance at him. 

The stove was a little stand of two burners, 
connected by a rubber pipe with a stopcock below 
the gas jet; and it stood on the top of a bookcase 
whose lower shelves, curtained in green rep, held 
her pans, dishes, and provisions. She emptied a 

[15] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

half bottle of milk into a saucepan and put it on 
to heat. 

A green-rep screen beside the door hid a wash- 
bowl and a mirror. This was her dressing room. 
When she had filled a kettle with water there, and 
set it on the stove, she took a typewriter from a 
small table at the foot of the couch and spread a 
tablecloth. She was quick and anxious, but com- 
petent in all her movements, absorbed, with a 
capable grace. 

She had a bowl of milk hot in no time. When 
she turned to him with it she found him raising 
himself uncertainly on his elbow. "Don't get up," 
she ordered. 

She sat down beside him, supporting him with 
an arm, and, holding the bowl between her knees, 
she* began to feed the milk to him with a table- 
spoon, maternally, but with an embarrassed flush 
of color. He could not see her face. He watched 
her hand, sipped the milk, and said, gratefully, 
"It's immense!" 

When the bowl was empty she got up to let him 
sink back on the cushions, and she stood to look 
down on him with a first faint twinkle of amuse- 
ment in reply to his smile. 

"Thanks," he said. He had stopped shivering. 
"I feel better already." 

"I can't give you a real dinner," she explained. 
"I have only breakfast things here." 

"You needn't worry about that," he said. "You 

[16] 



HENRI ANTHON 



can give me last Monday's breakfast. I haven't 
had it yet." 

He looked very young and boyish in spite of his 
unshaven chin. He was dressed in thin clothes, 
worn shiny, but well brushed. His feet were small 
in low shoes that were shabby — and silk socks. 
There was about him an air of unbeaten saucy 
pride that touched her. 

"I'll give you tea," she smiled, "and a poached 

Hers was a slow smile, unexpectedly dimpled; 
and though it was a little withdrawn and aloof, it 
had a quality of forgiveness that made it seem 
sympathetic. 

"May I help you? Not that I know how!" 

She shook her head. "It won't take me a 
moment." 

He watched her breaking the eggs and decant- 
ing them from their shells into the hot water, 
measuring the heaping spoonfuls of tea, filling the 
teapot from the steaming kettle, and propping the 
slices of bread on the sides of the toaster. The 
gas sang; the toast smelled; the girl was good- 
looking. 

"I think this is great fun," he said. 

"Do you.^" She did not raise her eyes from her 
work. 

"I wouldn't have missed it for — not for an order 
from a magazine." 

"No.?" 

[17] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

*'I understand, now, why I didn't get an order — 
and why they turned me out of my room — and why 
I fainted in the street." 

"Yes?" 

"Yes. It was so I'd enjoy this properly. Phil- 
osophic reflection: Death is made painful so you'll 
enjoy arriving in heaven." 

She busied herself setting the table, without 
replying. And there was something tragic in her 
face. He saw it. 

"What are you thinking?" he asked, pertly. 

She went back to the stove. "That it was 
lucky for you I had smelling salts. You might 
have found yourself in jail." 

"In hell, in fact, instead of heaven. Think of 
that! Why do you carry smelling salts?" 

"I fainted, once, myself." 

"Oh." Her tone had laconic implications; he 
considered them. "Have you been through it, 
too?" he asked. She did not answer. She pre- 
tended to be preoccupied with the eggs. "Of 
course you have ! " he said. "That's why you helped 
me. Where did you come to?" 

"I don't want to talk about it." 

"You ought to," he advised, cheerfully. "Noth- 
ing's half so bad if you talk about it. You think 
it's a fox gnawing at your vitals, and then you 
talk about it and find it's — well, a flea." 

Her silence reproved his indelicacy in mention- 
ing fleas. She brought him his eggs, his toast, and 

[18] 



HENRI ANTHON 



a cup of tea on a breakfast tray. "Can you prop 
yourself up in the corner? And take this on your 
knees?" 

He piled the cushions behind him. "I know 
you," he said. *' You'll do anything in the world 
for a person except give him your confidence." 
She laid her own place at the table, and sat down 
to it. "As for me," he went on, "I have what 
some one called 'the terrible gift of familiarity' — 
although I don't suppose I have half your kind- 
liness." 

They began to eat. 

She asked, "Have you been — turned out of your 
rooms?" 

He nodded, busy. "Room. Singular. I owe 
them three weeks' rent. They've kept my trunk. 
Nothing in it. Everything pawned." 

"What do you intend to do?" 

"Well, if this sort of thing will only happen 
when I faint, I'll keep on fainting." 

She considered him over the rim of her teacup 
as she drank. In spite of his hunger, he ate good- 
manneredly. "Have you written home?" 

"Did your he asked. "When you fainted?" 

She colored, putting down her cup. 

"You wouldn't think I had any pride," he said, 
"but I have. I'd die before I'd acknowledge to 
them that I'm defeated. They believe in me. 
They think I'm a genius. Maybe I am. I talk 
well, don't you think?" 

[19] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

She replied," I think I'd better do you another egg.^' 

"Besides," he grinned, "I've been like Ibsen. 
I couldn't write letters, because I couldn't afford 
the stamps. This food is going to my head. Don't 
mind what I say. It's the champagne — which you 
pretend is tea. Tell me if I talk too much." He 
was flushed. His eyes were feverish. He drank 
the tea in excited, vinous sips. 

She said, from the stove: "I don't know. It's 
so long since I heard anybody talk." And she said 
it as constrainedly as if it were a confession that 
had been wrung from her. 

"I know," he chattered. "They'll speak to you 
if you speak to them, but you can't make them 
talk. I was a week in a boarding house. I used 
to talk at the table. It was like talking in the top 
gallery of the Metropolitan. As if I interrupted 
the music — of their mastication. They almost 
hissed me." 

It was not what she had meant. "No one speaks 
in the office," she explained. "They're too busy. 
Except to dictate letters.'* 

"Aren't they wonderful.^^" he cried. "I keep 
wanting to stop them on the streets and say, 'No, 
but tell me, when do you live.'*'" 

She brought him his eggs and refilled his teacup. 

"Please eat something yourself," he begged. "I 
don't mind doing all the talking, but eating!" He 
rattled his knife and fork on his plate gayly. "All 
that sort of music is best for four hands — duets." 

[20 1 



HENRI ANTHON 



She replied, with a self-conscious awkwardness: 
"I'm not very hungry. And I'm afraid I never 
talk much." 

However, she took his drawings from the chair 
on which she had left them, beside the door, and 
she sat down at the table, to sip her tea, with her 
eyes on the top picture. He waited for her verdict, 
amusedly, enjoying his eggs. 

The first drawing was a pen-and-ink design, in 
an Aubrey Beardsley manner. It showed a great 
number of half-draped figures groping with out- 
stretched hands through a sort of forest of bamboo 
stems. Some of the figures were much impeded by 
their heavy draperies that dragged behind them 
and clogged their feet. And their eyes were closed. 

"Well, what do you make of that.?" 

"What is it?" she asked, frowning. "What do 
you call it.f^" 

"I don't know." He grinned. "That's the way 
it came to me. What do you call it? " 

"How do you mean, that's the way it came to 

you?" 

He gulped his tea. "Why, that's the way I 
work. That's why I'm hopeless as an illustrator. 
I can't tell what I'm going to do till I see it on the 
paper. And I don't know what it is, when it's 
done, any more than anyone else does." 

"I don't think I understand what you mean." 
"Well, look." He pantomimed it. "You sit 
down in front of your drawing board with a sheet 

[21] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

of blank paper on it. Perfectly blank and smooth 
— or it will interfere. Then you stare at it and 
wait." He stared hypnotically at his tray. "Un- 
til slowly you begin to get a picture on it. As if it 
were developing on a photographic plate — only 
dim. And you begin to draw it. And it comes 
clearer all around what you're drawing. Till 
you're finished. And it's like that." 

She looked from him to the drawing, puzzled. 
"I see." 

"When it's done, you make up names for it, if 
you want to. You can call that one *Life,' say — 
or *Love' — or * Blind Souls.' Evidently, it's people 
trying to find one another. That's what it looks 
like, anyway. I don't know, any more than you do." 

"I see." 

She was listening to an explanation of Anthon's 
art that would have interested some of his later 
critics. It did not interest her as much as it might 
have if she had understood how odd an individual 
his art really was. She thought it merely beyond 
her. She looked at the drawings and said nothing. 

Many of them contained nude figures. She 
turned them over self-consciously. He laughed. 
"That's another difficulty about the magazines," 
he said. "I always see people without the dis- 
guises they wear. If I put clothes on them they 
look like dressed-up monkeys to me — organ grind- 
ers' monkeys." 

One drawing seemed to be a nightmare of Broad- 

[22] 



HENRI ANTHON 



way, and she was struck by the way he had lined 
up the buildings in perspective. She suggested 
that he might get work in an architect's oflSce. 
He replied: "Or as a bricklayer. I know as much 
of one as the other." 

"Well," she asked, at last, "what do you intend 
to do.?'" 

"I wish I knew," he said. "I'd tell you." 

She got up to take his dishes from him. He lay 
on his back, his hands clasped on his chest, fed, 
relaxed, and happy. He began to talk about him- 
self lazily. 

His art, as he saw it, had no commercial value. 
And there was apparently no way of giving it any. 
At home, he said, in Columbus, he had worked for 
a time on a newspaper, making chalk plates, but 
his work in that line had always been amateurish. 
"I couldn't do newspaper work here," he con- 
fessed. "I couldn't compete. I'm not in their 
class." And he had once done ads. for shop win- 
dows — lettering, chiefly — but New York had no 
windows for that sort of home-made advertising. 
"I can't do it as well as the print shops. I'm not 
professional enough." As a matter of fact, he had 
been unsuccessful in any form of applied art at 
home. "1 can only do these weird things. I 
thought there'd be a market for them here. Ap- 
parently, there isn't." 

She listened and watched, her elbows on the 
table, her chin in her hands. He lay smiling at the 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

ceiling, and admitting his defeat with an air of 
languid detachment. 

"The truth of the matter is," he said, "I'm so 
sleepy, all at once, that I don't even know what 
I'm trying to say. I think if I had about five 
minutes -" 

His eyes closed, and he was asleep as suddenly 
as if he had fainted. 

It was some minutes before she realized that he 
was unconscious of her. Then, although she did 
not move, a curious change came over her face — a 
look of still and penetrating contemplation, wide 
eyed and clairvoyant, as she studied him. He 
rested like a corpse, in deep exhaustion, his head 
sunken in the cushions, his body incredibly thin 
and flat, his breathing scarcely perceptible, his face 
sad in the meek surrender of closed eyelids and 
quiet lips. He had something of the dignified 
indifference of death about him, and all the pathos 
of pitiful humanity. His mask of smiling egotism 
had been touchingly laid aside. He seemed to 
have collapsed inside his clothes, and they were 
bunched and bagged and wrinkled on him with 
no pretense now of nattiness. His feet, toeing in 
helplessly, showed the holes in the soles of his shoes, 
without shame. 

It was not merely these aspects of him that were 
reflected in her expression as she regarded him, 
item by item, from his lank hair to his worn heels. 
She, too, had laid aside a mask. She studied him — 



HENRI ANTHON 



as if she were a child that was no longer afraid, no 
longer self-defensive — with complete interest, al- 
most hungrily. In the silence and loneliness of 
that room where she had never had a guest she 
appraised him as if he were some unconscious 
castaway on a desert island where she had been 
isolated. She looked and looked, and thought and 
thought, with no more movement than the shift- 
ing of her eyes from his face to his hands, from 
his hands to his feet. And in the record of their 
intercourse, those silent minutes were of more impor- 
tance than all that had been said between them. 

She turned from him to his drawings, and 
regarded them as judicially as if they were the 
exhibits before the court. When she rose, at last, 
it was with the inscrutable calm air of a mind 
made up. She went to her clothes closet and took 
a bathrobe from its hook — a serviceable garment 
of Turkish toweling — and spreading it gently over 
him she let it fall to cover him from neck to 
ankles. He did not stir. She looked down at his 
placid face. There was something poetic in its 
young exhaustion. She stared at him a long time. 
Then she gathered up the dishes and went to 
wash them in her hand bowl noiselessly; and all her 
movements were slow, absorbed, contented; and 
although she did not quite smile, a pleasant reverie 
brooded in her eyes. 

She sat down again when she had tidied every- 
thing, and she prepared to read, but her mind 

[25] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

wandered from her book and she gazed at him in 
an absent-minded muse. He slept like a child. 
She reached from her bookshelf, stealthily, a type- 
written manuscript in a loose-leaf binder, and 
began to turn over the carbon copies of a great 
number of brief poems which she had filed there; 
and by the furtive way she glanced at him as she 
read — as if she were afraid that he might wake 
and catch her with them — it was evident that the 
verses were her own composition. 

He did not wake. She hid her manuscript 
behind the bookcase, took a sheet of typewriter 
paper from the drawer of the table, and wrote on 
it, in a firm, angular hand: "Gone to some friends 
for the night. Be back in time to cook breakfast." 
She laid this on the pillow beside his head, covered 
his feet with a skirt from the closet, put on her hat 
and coat, packed some things in a hand bag, turned 
down the light, and went out on tiptoe, closing the 
door gently behind her. 

She was not going to friends. She had no friends 
to go to. She was going to a dollar-a-night hotel 
on Fourth Avenue where she knew no questions 
would be asked. She had been there before. 



That was their beginning. 

By the end of a week he was working in her room 
every day, sleeping in a Third Avenue doss house 

[26] 



HENRI ANTHON 



where he could get a bed for fifteen cents a night, 
and sharing her breakfasts and her dinners. He 
did not eat any midday meal. 

"That's my contribution to my support," he 
said. He produced a number of drawings, but sold 
none. *'I'm educating the editors," he explained. 
"The public is next.'" He accepted from her what 
little money he needed, without any pretense that 
he was merely borrowing it. "I'll not try to escape 
the obligations of gratitude," he said, "by assur- 
ing you that I'll pay you back. I hope you'll never 
need it enough for that. But don't give me more 
than twenty -five cents at a time. Greenbacks are 
like checks to me. I don't like to carry them 
around uncashed." And he talked a great deal 
about himself without learning, in return, any- 
thing about her. 

His father, he told her, was a maker of picture 
frames who sold art materials, photographic sup- 
plies, stationery, and magazines in a little shop in 
which his wife assisted him behind the counter. 
He had never allowed his son to work there. He 
always said: "I might' ve been an artist, myself, 
if I hadn't been taught a trade." And he refused to 
let the boy help to earn his living until he was able 
to do it with his pencil — by lettering display cards 
for the family shop window. The elder Anthon, 
apparently, had talked about his son and boasted 
of his genius until he had convinced everyone of 
it, including the boy himself. Consequently, young 

3 [27] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Anthon's departure for New York, to make him- 
self famous, had been almost a civic event. And 
there was no possibility of going back to Columbus 
defeated. ** Broad Street, Ohio," he said, "would 
never forgive me." 

I have often wondered what Columbus thought 
of the monograph on Henri Anthon that appeared 
in the English edition of International Art- a few 
months ago. "Born," it began, "in Vienna on 
May 13, 1873, of a French mother and an English 
father — an itinerant artist of whom nothing is 
known — he emigrated at an early age to America 
with his parents, who settled in a city of Ohio, 
called Columbus after the discoverer of the con- 
tinent. The primitive culture of a frontier town 
gave Anthon pere little opportunity to practice his 
profession as a miniaturist, and he was driven to 
support his family by opening a stationer's shop 
in which he also made picture frames and sold the 
atrocious steel engravings of the period." 

That Anthon never told Grace Aspinwall any 
such fairy tale about his parents is a tribute, 
probably, to the penetrating candor of her glance. 
She was a country girl. She admitted it. She 
admitted that she had been born on a farm and 
that she had taught in the village school. She 
had studied shorthand at night and she had come to 
New York as a stenographer, simply, as she said, 
"to get away." It was not till the second week of 
their acquaintanceship that she confessed she was 

[28] 



HENRI ANTHON 



trying to sell poems to the magazines and he 
learned that she had come to New York with an 
ambition to set up as an author. 

"Now I know you!" he cried. **I recognize you 
now! I thought your profile was familiar when I 
first saw you. Only, in all the pictures I've seen 
of you you'd lost your nose. You're the Sphinx." 

At his first "Now I know you!" she had turned 
suddenly pale. And she blushed with guilty relief 
when he ended, "You're the Sphinx." He saw it 
and went on jocularly: "Talk about a woman 
keeping a secret! What else have you got hidden 
behind that stony calm?" 

They were dining together in her room. She 
murmured, "Don't be silly," trying to hide her 
confusion by turning to look back at the coffee 
pot on the gas stove. 

He reached her hand and held her. "Here," lie 
said. "Play fair. I've not tried to conceal any- 
thing from you. And you've taken it all without 
giving back a word." 

She did not try to release her hand, but she sat 
with her head averted. "I'm not concealing 
anything." 

"Yes, you are. You're concealing yourself. 
And some day you'll blame me for not understand- 
ing you." 

"You don't have to understand me." 

"Certainly, I do — if I'm not to do you an 
injustice." 

[29 1 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

"I don't care whether you do me an injustice or 
not." She went to stir the coffee, needlessly. 

"Fine!" he said. "Give the beggar a meal and 
slam the door on him. He can eat it on the front 
steps." 

"No," she answered, in a shaking voice, her back 
to him, "it isn't that. I can't talk about myself — 
to anyone. I want to forget it." 

Her tone moved him. He went to her and put 
his arm around her. She trembled but stood firm. 
"You've been doing everything in the world for 
me," he said. "I can't make any return except — 
in sympathy." 

She murmured: "Don't! I don't want to be — 
unhappy — again . ' ' 

It was, after all, a surrender. He took it as such. 
"All right," he said. "Beggars can't be choosers." 
He kissed her on the ear, inconsequentially, over 
her shoulder, and went back to his place at the table. 

And that began his love making. 

6 

He had read largely of French literature in cheap 
translations, and his idea of a love affair was fic- 
tional and French. That is to say, a love affair to 
him was a sort of romantic escape from the responsi- 
bilities and realities of life into something spirited, 
poetic, adventurous — and predatory. The obvious 
truth is that the instinct of affection in him carried 

130] 



HENRI ANTHON 



little of its normal human desire to protect and be 
protected. He had been the spoiled darling of his 
parents. Because of his early talent they had always 
treated him as if he were a young god. Even in 
his affection for his mother he must have been too 
superior to feel a desire for protection and too selfish 
to feel a desire to protect. Consequently, like many 
a spoiled child, he was now incapable of real love. 

Of course, he was as unaware of it as Grace 
Aspinwall was. He probably thought himself a 
very gallant lover. He was very gay and humorous 
about it. He invented teasing names for her — the 
Sphinx, Aglaia, Diana, the Vestal Virgin — and 
worked her into his drawings in every attitude of 
cold and godlike inscrutability. She took it very 
doubtfully at first, and then with the air rather of 
a mother whose practical devotion is being accepted 
humorously by a witty son. She did not altogether 
refuse his caresses, but she received them as if she 
knew that they meant nothing. 

"Very well. Young Pathos," he would say. "I'll 
make you look happy yet." 

She wrote a little poem, secretly, to interpret a 
fairy drawing that he had made, and she sold the 
poem and its illustration to a children's magazine, 
without telling him what she had done until she 
received the check for it. 

"I kiss," he said, "the hand that feeds me"; and 
he saluted her bent wrist cavalierly. "Now, let's 
have a bust." 

[31] 



■*^ 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

No. He had to have summer clothes. It was 
June. And she went with him on Saturday after- 
noon to a men's outfitters, like a critical wife, and 
saw that he got good value for his money. Natu- 
rally, the clerk mistook them for a young married 
couple, and Anthon teased her about it on the 
street. She endured the teasing in a silence that 
puzzled him. 

**I suppose," he said, **I'll have to cut your heart 
out before I find what's going on in it." 

He found out something a few weeks later. 

She had sold another poem and drawing, and 
with the money she rented the vacant studio ad- 
joining her room, and furnished it for him surrep- 
titiously. He was sincerely touched when she 
showed him what she had done. 

"Now listen to me, Grace," he said. "I'll not 
use it unless you'll share it with me." 

"Share it?" 

"Yes. You might as well marry me. You're 
supporting me already. I can't do anything with- 
out you. You've picked me out of the gutter and 
put me on my feet — more or less. You might as 
well finish the job. You can't get out of it now, 
anyway. I'm no good without you." 

"No," she said. "I can't." 

"Can't?" 

She shook her head and, putting him from her, 
she went to stare out the window. 

*'Can^t!" he repeated, in a low tone. 

[32] 



HENRI ANTHON 



" No," she said, hoarsely. " I'm married already." 

He put his hat on, as if she had turned him out. 
He sat down in helpless amazement. "Well, I'll be 
damned!" 

She did not speak. She remained at the window, 
looking out as tragically as if it was her past that 
she saw there. 

"Who is he.^" he demanded. 

She would not tell him. 

"Where is he?" 

"I don't know." 

"But suppose he turns up here," Anthon cried, 
"and finds you " 

"He doesn't want to find me. He didn't want to 
marry me. We never spoke to each other after we 
came out of the vestry. I left him at the gate." 

"Oh well," he said. "That's no marriage at all. 
It wouldn't take a court five minutes to annul that." 

She shook her head, still at the window. "No." 

"What!" 

She turned to him. "I can't explain it and I won't 
discuss it. But he daren't annul it, and I'll not." 

"But whzj?" 

"Because I won't admit that it happened." 

"Won't ad What do you mean.? " 

"I mean that I'm married," she said, "and 
there's nothing to be done." And suddenly, fling- 
ing out her hands, she cried: "I won't talk about 
it ! I won't— I won't talk about it ! " 

It was a threat of hysteria and it had the odd 

[38] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

effect of giving him back his self-possession. He 
took off his hat. "Very well, Mrs. John Doe," he 
said. "If you don't care, I don't. Are we going 
to have dinner in or are we treating ourselves to a 
restaurant.'^" 

They went to a restaurant. They went to a 
play. They made, in fact, a silent and preoccupied 
evening of it together. They walked back to their 
rooms as mute as if they had quarreled. They 
opened their separate doors, in the glimmer of the 
hall light, morosely. 

"Well," he said, "good night! I don't know why 
in thunder I'm behaving like this. I haven't any 
right. I'm just as grateful " 



n 



Don't!" She put her hand out. He made a 
movement to take it. She caught his fingers in a 
spasmodic clutch of contrition and apology — and 
was gone before he could speak. 



She behaved, next morning, as if nothing had 
happened. She seemed interested only in getting 
him curtains, a jute rug, a drawing table, a student 
lamp, and another check from a magazine to meet 
their increased expenses. She failed in the latter 
effort for so long a time that she took one of his 
fantastic architectural nightmares to the office and 
persuaded the firm to give Anthon a trial in the 
drafting room. 

[34] 



HENRI ANTHON 



"You cari work there in the mornings," she 
announced to him, "and have your afternoons 
and evenings free. It will more than pay your 
rent." 

" I'm game," he said. " Whistler once worked for 
the Geodetic Survey, didn't he?" And he began 
to go to the office with her, every morning, as slyly 
dutiful as a mischievous child going to school. 

Their relations were, apparently, merely friendly. 
She was more than ever uncommunicative and he 
had no idea of what was going on in her mind. Yet 
it was during this period that she wrote her mystical 
poem, "The Closed Garden," laying it down line by 
line, like the unblended vibrating colors of an impres- 
sionistic painting — each line complete in itself, yet 
almost meaningless by itself — in a technic that un- 
consciously expressed her desperate self -repression. 
If you take that poem at its face value, it is merely 
an oddly picturesque dream of color and music and 
the beauty of nature enchanted. But read it with 
the understanding that she is herself the closed 
garden, and it is as emotional and impassioned as 
the Song of Songs. 

She was a month writing it. She rarely added 
more than two or three lines a day. She reread and 
rewrote it chiefly at night, in her own room. He 
did not know what she was doing. It is doubtful 
whether she really knew herself. 

She was the victim of a deformity of spirit that 
was quite as fatal to happiness in love as his la-ck 

135] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

of the protective instinct. The circumstances of 
her marriage evidently had given her a shock that 
had warped and stunted her puritanically. In her 
poems she could express the desires of her creative 
energy because they disguised themselves so that 
she did not recognize them. But in her life and in 
her relations with Anthon she would not let them 
express themselves at all. She was happy in a 
maternal instinct to protect him, and she was 
unhappy because in his jocular independence he 
neither sought protection nor gave it. Like 
Anthon himself, she was trying to live on terms 
which life will not accept. Their disaster was 
inevitable. 

He began to make friends at the office, and 
these friends came to see him. Her position 
was, at once, equivocal. He teased her about it. 
"I'm not one to talk scandal," he said, "but 
you'll not be Mrs. John Doe much longer. You'll 
be Mrs. Don Juan. What are you going to do 
about that?" 

He might have known that she would do some- 
thing unexpected. 

At first she refused to go on the streets with him; 
she ate rather furtive meals in his studio; and she 
shut herself up in her own room whenever his bell 
rang. He watched her amusedly. 

"You certainly know how to make innocence look 
guilty," he congratulated her. "I think I'd better 
tell them you're my sister." 

[36] 



HENRI ANTHON 



He had to accept invitations without her. He 
ate luncheon with another stenographer, who flirted 
as openly as she chewed gum. And one evening he 
went out without making any explanation, remained 
away till after midnight, and returned with a car- 
nation in his buttonhole. 

*'That girl will certainly marry me," he warned 
her, * ' if some one else doesn't. I'm wax in her hands. 
I melt." 

It was next morning that she did the unexpected. 

She came to breakfast with a rolled document in 
her hands, pale, after a sleepless night. She gave 
him the paper as if it were a death warrant. "What's 
up now?" he asked, nervously. 

It was a marriage certificate to prove that Grace 
Aspinwall and Henry Anthon had been "united in 
holy matrimony " by the curate of a Chicago church, 
"according to the Form of Solemnization of Matri- 
mony of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the 
United States of America, and in accordance with 
the Laws of the State of Illinois." 

For the moment it convinced him. He had a 
queer feeling that he had dreamed something of 
the sort and now held in his hand the evidence 
that it had not been a dream — that it had really 
happened. 

"What!" he cried. "Where did you " And 

then he held the paper up to the light and dis- 
covered that the names and the date had been 
altered. "But this," he said, "this is " 

[37] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

She gasped, strangled. "I've — IVe changed it. 
It's the one I " 

"But it's no good." 

She nodded dumbly. She knew that. 

"Then why " 

"It '11 do to show. People won't notice." 

He looked at her, blank with amazement. She 
was twisting and pulling at her fingers, her eyes 
fixed on him in a painful dilation, her lips twitching. 
And abruptly she held out to him — a wedding 
ring. 

She had 30 much the air and attitude of a guilty 
child mutely confessing some little theft, that he 
could hardly resist the nervous impulse to laugh at 
her. "But here ! " he said, between amusement and 
pity, "you've simply destroyed your marriage cer- 
tificate! You needed it to get your divorce." 

"I can't. I can't get a divorce. I'd — I'd be 
ashamed to. And it would ruin /^^m." 
Ashamed to! What do you mean?" 
He — he's a young clergyman. I made him 
marry me because he — I won't tell you! I won't 
tell anyone. They'd all guess — if they knew we'd 
been married. They — He — " She felt her way 
stiffly to the table and sat down. 

Life had become suddenly unromantic to him. 
"Phew!" He blew a long breath of impatient de- 
pression and annoyance. He swore to himself at 
the marriage certificate. "Don't your people know 
about this?" he asked, flicking at it angrily. 

[38] 






HENRI ANTHON 



"No." 

"And you won't get a divorce because you don't 
want them to know that he — that your young 
clergyman — betrayed you? Is that it?" 

"Yes." 

He got up, and tossed the paper on the table 
beside her, and began to pace up and down the 
room. "What do your people suppose has hap- 
pened to you?" 

"Nothing." 

"Nothing?" 

"I get letters from them at the oflSce." 

" Well, I'll be blowed ! " He stood looking at her, 
his hands deep in his pockets. "And you're pre- 
pared to marry me in this way, rather than " 

"I don't want to marry you. I just wanted to 
fix it so we could say we were married." 

"Oh, really!" He was sarcastic. "And leaving 
my feelings entirely out of the question, how about 
your precious clergyman? What will he say when 
he hears it?" 

"Nothing.'* 

"Nothing!'^ 

"He's afraid." 

"Afraid of you?" 

"He's afraid I'd tell. They'd know what had hap- 
pened if they knew we'd been married that way. 
Besides, he's religious. He took it as a — a sort of 
penance." 

"He married you as a penance!" 

[39] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

"No. I made him marry me secretly. I threat- 
ened to tell what — what had happened — if he 
didn't. And then when we came out of the church 
I told him he could go — I'd never see him again — 
I hated him. And he said — I don't know — that it 
was his punishment." 

"It seems to me," he said, considering her ex- 
pression, "you're punishing yourself as much as 
him." 

"It would be worse if I — if I tried to get a 
divorce. The whole thing would come out. It — 
it would kill my father." 

"Well," he cried, exasperated, "how about his 
finding out that you're here with me. Suppose 
some one recognized you on the street .f^" 

"That's why I wanted to say we were married." 

" Excuse me ! I'm going to get out ! I don't want 
a lifetime of scenes like this." He went to get his 
hat. 

"No!" She rose in a frenzy of which he had not 
thought her capable. She ran to the door and stood 
with her back against it. "I can't," she panted. 
"I can't let you. I'm — I'm going crazy. I can't 
think of anything but — I can't sleep. I don't want 
anything except to help you, to look after you. 
I want you. I can't let you go. I can't face it 
again. It's too lonely. Just let me say we're mar- 
ried, so I can tell people and write home. Just let 
me say it, so I'll not be disgraced. Please ! Please! 
She wrung her hands. "Don't leave me." 

[40] 



HENRI ANTHON 



**0h, hell!" He flung his hat across the room. 
*'I don't care. Do what you like." 

8 

So she became "Mrs. Anthon," and the terms 
and conditions of their tragedy were set. 

To all outward appearances it was a love match 
of the deepest devotion — on her part, at least. In 
a crowded room with him, it seemed impossible for 
her to keep her eyes from him. And it was, ap- 
parently, that rarest of marriages, a union of artistic 
minds in daily collaboration, for now they conceived 
the idea of publishing their Bibelot. (It was on the 
plates in the Bibelot that he first became "Henri" 
Anthon.) She continued her office work, and so 
did he. He developed a talent for taking the bare 
elevation of an architect's plans and producing a 
sketch for a building in a romantic color and 
atmosphere that no client could resist. He learned 
to etch for the Bibelot with a skill that has made him 
famous. And her verses, if they made no great 
sensation at the moment, stand now as "the only 
American woman's work that ranks with Christina 
Rossetti's." 

The critics who made the Anthons famous have 
variously interpreted their work in terms of their 
personalities. And the man who wrote the article 
on Anthon for International Art has a consistent 
theory of the artist's growth in terms of his exper- 

[41] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

ience. It is all stuff. For instance, the critics have 
none of them guessed that Anthon's etchings in the 
Bibelot were not made to illustrate his wife's poems, 
but the poems were written to interpret the etch- 
ings. Anthon was never an illustrator. And his 
wife was never a purely original poet. She took her 
dreams from him. 

A great many of her poems were love poems. 
Since she had no eyes for anyone but Anthon, it was 
taken for granted that she had written these poems 
to him. And since he was all eyes for every hand- 
some woman that he saw, it was supposed that she 
was so silent because she was unhappily jealous. 
The secret behind the outward seeming of their 
lives was never suspected — not even by those of us 
who lived in the same house with them. Not until 
the whole thing had come to its tragic conclusion 
did Anthon disclose the truth, in a midnight con- 
fession in my rooms — a confession that was a pitia- 
ble outburst of self -justification in which he related 
all the details that I have been trying to recon- 
struct, more or less imaginatively, in this memoir of 
him. 

9 

It seems that her clergyman heard of her marriage 
and came to see her. He arrived while Anthon was 
alone in the studio, and Anthon received him with 
no suspicion of who he was, and chatted sociably 
over a plate that was in its final stages. 

[42] 



HENRI ANTHON 



"He wasn't dressed like a preacher," Anthon 
said, "and he didn't look like one. He looked more 
like a poet. I thought he was some young Shelley 
that wanted to contribute to the Bibelot. They 
were always hunting us up." 

The moment that Mrs. Anthon entered, Anthon 
knew who the man was. She looked at him as if 
she saw a ghost. She did not seem to see Anthon 
there at all. The man said, "Grace!" And she 
asked, "What do you want?" And Anthon took his 
hat and fled. But the tone of that "Grace!" was 
the tone of misery seeing the door of salvation. And 
though her "What do you want?" closed the door 
and stood guard in front of it, Anthon escaped with 
the conviction that the door would be opened. 

He expected it with relief. He was no longer in 
love with her — even in his own way — and this 
"young Shelley" was obviously "mad about her." 
Anthon protested that he was grateful for what she 
had done for him. He was convinced of that 
gratitude. But it was evident that gratitude had 
become a burden to him. I had long been aware 
that he resented his subordinate position as the 
supposed illustrator of her poems, and we had all 
known that he was more than interested in a 
smoldering lady novelist of great emotional in- 
tensity who came to their Thursday evenings at 
home. 

He walked about the streets for an hour. When 
he returned to the studio, Grace was alone there. 
4 [ 43 ] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

He asked cheerfully, "Well, have you made it up?" 
And, of course, he asked it in a manner that showed 
how much he hoped that she had made it up. 

She rose to her feet, as if she had been called upon 
to stand and take her sentence. "You expected 
me to!" she said. 

"Well, for Heaven's sake," he cried, "what do 
you want? The man's mad about you and you're 
his wife! You won't let me be anything to you. 
We can't go on living this way. It isn't human. 
What do you expect?" 

She had expected to make her own peculiar terms 
with life, and life would not accept them. In the 
person of Henri Anthon, it refused them angrily. 
It cried: "What do you expect? What do you 
expect?" 

She got her hat and pinned it on, looking at him 
— or rather looking through him, as if she were 
unable to focus her eyes on him, frowning at him, 
wide eyed, with an imcertain and somewhat drunken 
stare. He kept asking: "What do you want to do? 
What do you want me to do?" 

She shook her head. She went to the door, stiffly 
erect, but not very sure of her feet, apparently. 
She turned on the threshold, holding the door knob, 
as if she were going to speak to him, but she seemed 
to be unable to find him with her eyes and she tried 
to smile at the room in general. She achieved only 
a vague and rather maudlin distortion of the face. 
It was an expression that offended him. It was not 

[44] 



HENRI ANTHON 



beautiful. It had that sordid air of stupid reality 
which he hated in life. 

She went out. He threshed around the room for 
a while, in a state of nervous exasperation. He 
tried to pack up his things, but he had nothing in 
which to pack them. Finally he hurried out to the 
street himself, walked aimlessly up and down, had 
his dinner in a restaurant, and returned to find the 
room still empty. 

It was ten o'clock that night before he learned 
that she had been killed by a street car. 

10 

I do not offer any of this in criticism of Anthon. 
I feel that he was perhaps less to blame than she. 
I offer it in explanation of his art and his life. 

It explains, for instance, why he published no 
more issues of the Bibelot, why he never illustrated 
any poems after her death, and refused all contracts 
for such work, and supported himself as an archi- 
tectural draftsman. It explains why he never 
married; his relations with women continued to be 
merely jocular and predatory. This attitude of 
mind is the secret, I think, of his famous series of 
dry-point portraits of American femininity. His 
"Manhattan Nights," done at the same period, are 
another matter. They are his subconscious dreams 
made visible. The critics who try to reconcile his two 
manners are merely unaware that he had two minds. 

145] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

I lost sight of him when he went to Paris; but 
when I say that he went there like a man ascending 
bodily to Heaven, I mean it literally. His etchings 
of the Latin Quarter, of the Boulevards, and of 
Montmartre are pictures of the Promised Land. 
They have all the charm and beauty of a dream come 
true. They are the acme of his recognized achieve- 
ment. And when war and the German invasion 
brought the terrible realities of life trampling into 
his earthly paradise, it was inevitably the end of 
everything for him. There was nothing left for him 
but to reject life on such terms — as there had been 
nothing left for Grace Aspinwall. It was suicide 
lor a man of his age and physique to volunteer with 
'his Latin Quarter friends, and he must have known 
that it was suicide. 

The recent monograph of him, in International 
Art, showed as his only monument the wooden cross 
that marks his grave behind the French lines at 
Souchez. Evidently, he never told his Paris ad- 
mirers about the Broadway Building. And that, I 
think, is the great criticism that life has to make of 
Anthon's art. He was ashamed of his one achieve- 
ment that life accepted, on its own terms, proudly. 



11. BIGDANREILLY 

"He is a chip, a hand specimen, from the base- . 
ment structure upon which American politics rest." i 
■ — H. G. Wells, The Future in America. 



CALL it "Headquarters." That is the way the 
politicians always refer to it, although it is a 
club. And imagine the politicians sitting in their 
puffy leather chairs around the reception room of 
the club that night, looking out on the street lights 
of Fifth Avenue, under oil portraits of their worthy 
predecessors, with brass cuspidors at their feet and 
brass match safes at their elbows. And imagine 
them raising a cloud of cigar smoke and a private 
mutter of political conversation, and an occasional 
quiet chuckle or an amused cough that represented 
laughter — a red-faced, hoarse cough, with one eye- 
brow up and a fat hand over the mouth. 

"Some of the best men in New York were there," 
Gatecliff boasted, in his account of what happened. 
"Some of the best. Millionaires. Heads of cor- 
porations." 

He named names that it would be almost blas- 
phemous to repeat in print. 

At the far end of the room, the descending stairs 
made a railed landing like a balcony. Wig Dan 

[47] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Reilly was in the habit of coming down those stairs 
to hold his reception on the floor of the room, nod- 
ding and shaking hands and talking here and there 
freely, unless the matter was so confidential that it 
was necessary to withdraw to a corner table. And 
everybody always preserved an appearance of tak- 
ing part in some social function that was genially 
informal, perhaps because Dan Reilly's power was 
outside the law and any consultation with him might 
well make itself look as innocent as possible. 

This night he appeared, as expected, on the stairs; 
and they all rose as usual to greet him, still chatting, 
as if their rising were automatic and absent-minded, 
although it was neither. He descended as far as the 
landing and stood with his hands in his pockets, 
looking down sullenly at the men who turned to him 
in surprise as he waited. 

He was dressed in black. Ordinarily he wore 
clothes that had an air of the race track and the 
betting ring. His big, good-natured, florid, round 
face looked heavy, sulky, lowering. He said, "I'll 
see 2/ow," and pointed insolently to a man below him. 

Silence. Amazed silence. 

He looked from face to face. "And I'll see you.''* 

This man flushed, examined his cigar, put it 
between his biting teeth, and smoked with narrowed 
eyes, thoughtfully. 

"And your 

A nervous clearing of some embarrassed throat. 

"And your 

[48] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



He picked out a half dozen. "The rest o' you," 
he said, "can go home." 

And they went home. 

"We went home!" Gatechff cried. "We went 
home! But" — and he marked his point with a spite- 
ful forefinger — "it ended Big Dan as the boss of 
the organization. He never got a chance to speak 
that way to a group of gentlemen again." 

From one point of view, the scene ought to be 
historic. It ought to be painted by the artist who 
did that museum picture of the French king's con- 
fessor, a barefooted monk, descending the grand 
staircase of the palace while all the silken courtiers 
bowed and smirked before him. (Dan Reilly, of 
the Bowery and the underworld, saying contemp- 
tuously to the nobility and ruling class of New York, 
"The rest o' you can go home!") 

From another point of view, it is almost as scandal- 
ous as anything you will find in the secret memoirs 
of the French king's court. Gatecliff was there as 
the confidential adviser of a "traction magnate" 
who wished to procure for his company a monopoly 
right in certain city streets in order to operate a 
public utility; and the magnate was discreetly 
offering Big Dan and the other leaders of the organi- 
zation some million dollars' worth of stock in the 
company, in return for the franchise. (It is impos- 

[49] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

sible to be more explicit without incurring a libel 
suit.) Moreover, all the other millionaires were 
there for similar reasons. Big Dan controlled the 
votes that made it necessary for the "best men" 
in New York to do business with him. It was illegal, 
corrupt, poisonous — but there it was. They had to 
do it, or somebody else would. They put a good 
face on it — a polite, conventional face — and Big 
Dan had hitherto looked at that face grimly, but 
with every appearance of being deceived by it. 
Now, incredibly, he had reached out his great, 
brutal hand and smacked it. 
Why? 

3 

The answer is simple. It merely involves an ex- 
planation of Big Dan's character and his point of 
view, the story of his life, a picture of the moral 
and political background of his career, and an 
account of his relations with his mother, with Gate- 
cliff, and with Gatecliff's sister Mary. 

A man suddenly says a decisive word and makes 
a final gesture. Behind his impulse to say that word 
and make that gesture there is a lifetime of growth, 
experience, emotion. All his past — all that he has 
known and thought and seen and suffered up to 
that moment — all has a part in the motive of his 
action. And all his future comes influenced out 
of it. 

Dan Reilly's moment on the balcony was such 

[50] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



a nioment. It is not impossible to find its vague 
beginnings in events that occurred even before his 
birth. For example: 

Some weeks before he was born his father was 
killed in the "infamous draft riots" of the summer 
of 1863. His father was the Hugh Reilly, the '*Red" 
Reilly, who led the riots in his district because of 
the clause in the Conscription Act by which a man 
could buy exemption for three hundred dollars. 
Red Reilly could not understand why only the poor 
in pocket should be forced to die for their country. 
He died learning it. He was in arrears with his rent 
at the time — as he was at all times — and the land- 
lord evicted the widow of the traitor, in a burst of 
patriotism, as soon as he heard what had happened 
to Reilly. 

Red Reilly's unborn son heard it later. He 
heard it as the story of his father's revolt against 
those governing classes who had passed a draft law 
providing for their own exemption. And I believe 
it is not too far fetched to see him as Red Reilly' s 
son unconsciously carrying on his father's quarrel, 
when he stood on the stairs at Headquarters and 
said to later beneficiaries of legislative privilege, 
*'The rest o' you can go home." \ 

And whether that is far fetched or not, this much 
is certain: the circumstances of his birth strongly 
determined the psychology of his great dramatic 
moment. 

With his mother evicted as the widow of a de- 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

linquent traitor, he might have been born in the 
gutter if she had not been given shelter by a woman 
more unfortunate even than she. Consequently, 
he was born **amid the most depraved surround- 
ings" — in a tenement that stood in the back yard 
of a Grove Street house that was itself sufficiently 
depraved, although it kept up an appearance of 
red-brick respectability with a rare old Colonial 
door and a notable fanlight. 

The shack behind it was a clapboarded wooden 
building that had been a wagon factory, and then 
a livery stable, before it became unfit for the use of 
valuable animals. It was occupied by a number of 
unpitied outcasts who lived there, practically rent 
free, by the grace of the woman who kept the Grove 
Street house. There were no chimneys in the build- 
ing. Stovepipes protruded through some of the 
broken window panes; but there was no stove in 
the room in which the future ruler of New York 
was born; its regular occupant kept herself warm 
with alcohol. It was a room that had been part 
of the paint shop of the wagon factory, and in one 
corner the drip of innumerable cart wheels had 
deposited a ridge, a hummock, a rounded stalag- 
mite, of hardened paint. The head of Mrs. Reilly's 
mattress took advantage of that mound to make 
a pillow. 

Dan was born on a cool August evening, after a 
day's rain, by the light of a blessed candle that had 
been borrowed from a neighbor. He was a twelve- 

[52] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



pound baby, as lusty as a young porker, and his 
arrival was as much an event as if he had been born 
in a convent. The thwarted maternal instincts 
of his neighbors received him with gratified excite- 
ment. They carried him up and down stairs 
wrapped in an old wl/ite-silk petticoat, exhibiting 
him from room to room. As a man-child, he had 
the rank of a young heir among his slaves. 

"There y' are!" as one of them said, admiringly. 
"Many's the gurl '11 break her heart fer yoUy yuh 
little Turk!" 

The occupants of the Grove Street house lavished 
gifts on him and invalid comforts on his mother. 
For two months they cared for her while she was too 
ill to help herself. They brought her sewing to do 
when she grew strong enough to resent charity. 
She said good-by to them regretfully when she was 
well enough to move to more comfortable surround- 
ings. And she parted from them with a gratitude 
that she never forgot or allowed her son to forget. 

Once when the police were making a vie© crusade 
ostentatiously, she told him the story of his birth 
and said, "Danny, if y' iver do anything to make 
life harder fer the likes o' thim, yeh're no son o' 
mine." 

He did a great deal to make life harder for the 
likes of them, as any ruler makes life harder for his 
subjects; there were hundreds of them in his home 
district, and they had to pay his henchmen for the 
protection they received. But he protected them 

[53] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

from other exploitation and from the sort of hard- 
ship and persecution that his mother besought him 
to spare them. ** The king of the underworld," "his 
saloons their known resorts," he accepted them on 
their own terms as part of his constituency. He 
represented them in politics as well as he represented 
anybody. And he was still representing them when 
he stood on the balcony at Headquarters and looked 
down on those men who, he knew, despised him 
secretly as much as they despised his constituents. 



Most determinative of all, he stood there as his 
mother's son. 

When she left the Grove Street tenement she 
carried him to a room in Hudson Street, and settled 
down to do scrubbing and washing and sewing to 
support him. She was a frail young woman, from the 
north of Ireland, thrifty and ambitious. She had 
married Red Reilly against everyone's advice but 
his, and she had emigrated to America with him to 
escape the commiseration of the prejudiced. She 
was without relatives in New York, and almost 
without friends. Alone, in silence, like a prisoner 
digging a tunnel secretly, she set to work to escape 
from poverty. 

And she failed because of a characteristic which, 
in Big Dan Reilly, made his political fortune. She 
was insanely charitable. Anyone who asked her 

[54] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



for help could have it from her. She would give 
away her money, her food, her clothes, her bedding. 
It was as if, having suffered the extreme of ship- 
wreck and been rescued by the charity of the most 
needy, she was unable thereafter to refuse anyone 
a share in whatever little she had. She was never 
able to get ahead. There was never anything for 
to-morrow in her purse or her larder. And it was 
this quality in Big Dan that afterward made it 
possible for him to hold his followers together by 
what the newspapers called "the cohesive power of 
public plunder." More of that later. 

By the time he was six years old he was selling 
newspapers and blacking shoes, in order to help her. 
But only after school hours. She made him go to 
school faithfully. And even as a shoeblack he showed 
some organizing ability, for he got the monopoly 
right to shine the shoes of the policemen in the 
station house of his precinct, and he did the work 
so well that he obtained the same work in another 
precinct and took an assistant. He sold newspapers 
in City Hall Park long enough to make friends in a 
press room, where he took the job of helping to 
carry papers from the presses to the delivery carts, 
at a salary of a dollar and a half a week. 

"When I got to be ten years old," he said once, in 
a speech on the Bowery, "I got a teacher in school 
to let me go at two o'clock, an' then I was able to 
serve that newspaper all to myself. I passed the 
grammer department o' my school, an' I was one 

[55] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

o' seven boys to go to the Free Academy, in Twenty- 
third Street, I think it was. Free as it was, it wasn't 
free enough for me to go there. I had to go an' 
commence the struggle o' life." 

And there again, I think, spoke the son of Red 
Reilly, in revolt against the class that could afford 
leisure for education, and acutely conscious of the 
fact that their organs of publicity spoke of him as 
having *'the manners and speech of the typical 
^tough.'" 

However, to get down to Gatecliff and his sister 
and the immediate personal motives behind that 
scene at Headquarters — 



Big Dan, as a boy, was so large for his age that he 
arrived at long pants a year earlier than the others 
of his generation; and this made him inevitably 
notable among his contemporaries. He was handy 
with his fists, as they all were, and his size gave him 
a natural superiority in street fighting, which was 
their chief recreation. He was kindly and good- 
natured, so that he did not tyrannize over his com- 
panions, but fought the older bullies who would 
have tyrannized over them. It was so that he first 
championed young Buttony Gatecliff against op- 
pression, and won the devotion of Buttony's sister. 

They called him "Buttony" because he wore his 
knickerbockers buttoned to his roundabout. He 

[56] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



was the timid son of a conciliatory grocer, Amos 
GateclifF, who kept a shop on Hudson street, and 
he was persecuted by all the little bruisers of the 
neighborhood, who had learned that they could 
blackmail him for sweets from his father's shelves 
by waylaying him on the streets and torturing him 
with threats of violence unless he brought them 
tribute. His life had become a continual terror. 
He had either to steal at home or be hunted like 
defenseless virtue abroad. His only protector was his 
sister Mary, who escorted him whenever she could. 

She was escorting him home from school one 
winter afternoon when he was set upon by three of 
his tormentors. One held her, and the others took 
Buttony and rubbed his face in the snow and 
crammed it down his collar and filled his mittens 
with it and stifled his outcries while they exacted 
promises of future bribes. Fate brought Danny 
Reilly on the scene. Mary Gatecliff knew him by 
sight; she had seen him in her father's shop buying 
an occasional twist of "orange pekoe" as a present 
for his mother. She cried out to him. 

In an instant he was sprawling on the pavement, 
with the largest bully under him and the other two 
on his back. She caught Buttony to her and pre- 
vented him from running away while she stood, loyal 
but terrified into helplessness, watching Big Dan do 
battle for her. That battle was a primitive affair, 
bloody and furious. It was not fought according to 
any Queensberry rules. Dan terrified one opponent 

1571 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

into flight by trying to bite the nose off him. He 
kicked another in the kneecap and all but broke his 
leg. The third did not wait his turn. He popped 
into a basement like a rat into its hole, and escaped 
by some back exit. 

Dan picked up his cap, grinning, brushed the 
snow off himself, and asked her, "Which way 're 
yuh goin'.?" 

As they went she confided all Buttony's troubles 
to him, and he listened with a touch of that social 
superiority which he had always felt for the Gate- 
cliffs. They were shopkeepers. They were in- 
gratiatingly polite to customers. They were 
English, and they had English traditions of class 
subservience which no young Irishman of Dan's 
temperament could understand. He walked beside 
her like a s worded D'Artagnan beside the wife of 
Bonacieux, the mercer of The Three Musketeers. 

He said to her at parting, "If any o' them kids 
ever picks on Buttony again, you come an' tell m^." 

She was a pale and intense little hero worshiper 
with black hair and large dark eyes. She raised 
those eyes to him in a most submissive admiration. 
"Thanks," she murmured, from her heart. 

Thereafter Buttony was safe under Dan's pro- 
tection and the protection of his gang. The word 
was passed around that Mary was Dan's "girl" 
and that any boy who gave Buttony any cause to 
complain of him might as well prepare to meet his 
day of judgment. 

C58] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



The gang was merely a group of a dozen boys who 
played and fought together as boys of a neighbor- 
hood always do. They called themselves the Hylos, 
for no reason that anyone remembers. Dan had 
found a clubroom for them in a vacant coal cellar; 
he had found it by merely breaking in a cellar door. 
They held nightly meetings there, by candlelight, 
with the cellar windows covered, playing cards, 
shooting craps, and feasting on apples, bread, 
bologna, pails of jam, bottles of catsup, tins of 
salmon or whatever else they had been able to 
gather during the evening. And they gathered these 
things as boys rob orchards, in an adventurous 
spirit of young deviltry. 

One of them was a butcher's son, and it was his 
duty to steal his father's sausage. He afterward 
became the president of a packing company and he 
always spoke of Big Dan with real affection. An- 
other was the son of a baker, and he filched rolls and 
cakes. The rest went in twos and threes to make 
organized raids on push-cart peddlers and the goods 
displayed in front of food shops. Big Dan laid out 
the tactics of their raids and attended to the police. 
He would walk up to the ofBcer on the beat and en- 
gage him in conversation. "Purty good shine, eh.^* " 
he might say, pointing to his patron's shoes, boyish 
and innocent, with no sign of shrewdness in his big 
smile. And while the officer was being "jollied" 
the other Hylos would grab their loot and run. 
Their organized mischief annoyed the precinct for a 
5 [59] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

whole winter before the police discovered that their 
station shoeblack was the leader of the gang — even 
though he once saved his confederates by acciden- 
tally tripping up an officer when the pursuit broke 
out prematurely. 

They would occasionally "roll a rummy"; that is 
to say, if they met a drunken man in a quiet spot 
they would relieve him of any money that he had, 
on the pragmatic theory that they might as well 
have it as the first crook he met. One or two of 
them snatched purses, although this was forbidden 
by their leader except in cases where it was evident 
that the owner of the purse could well afford to lose 
it. They took part in election campaigns, pestering 
the cart-tail orators of the opposing party, pelting 
the illuminated Wagons that carried "transpar- 
encies" though the streets, marching uninvited in 
torchlight processions, and raiding the bonfires on 
election nights to obtain fuel for their own rejoicings. 
In all these undertakings they acted like a "gang of 
young ruffians." But they had no idea that they 
were a gang of young ruffians. They thought they 
were merely a mutual amusement club for social 
recreation and innocent adventure. 

They had no more idea that their street activities 
were criminal than they had that their pranks in the 
parish church were impious. Several of them, 
including Big Dan, were altar boys and acolytes. 
They relieved the tedium of religious services by 
carrying their candles so as to drip hot grease on the 

[60] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



heads of the boys in front of them, by putting bent 
pins on sanctuary benches and tying knots in the 
the arms of soutanes. They did these things while 
carefully maintaining the devout expressions of 
young cherubs in a heavenly choir, and their victims 
kept the same pious faces while they retaliated and 
defended themselves. No boy thought of appealing 
to the priests for protection any more than he would 
have thought of running to the police for aid in a 
street fight; it was against the code and social usage. 
And if the priests knew what was going on behind 
their backs, they ignored it — ^as the police usually 
did. 

Buttony came into the Hylos under Dan's wing, 
and he was endured there for Dan's sake, but with 
no enthusiasm. The others did not like him. Smok- 
ing made him sick. He had no natural gift for pro- 
fanity and he was unpleasantly ingratiating and self- 
conscious in its use. He was not of their religion, 
which made him an outlander. He stole with a 
tremblingly defiant air, as if he expected to be struck 
by lightning. And, of course, it was he who was 
caught. 

He was arrested one night for trying to snatch 
a purse in emulation of a more expert associate. 
He was taken to the station house and locked up. 
As soon as Big Dan heard of it he went to the station 
on the general pretext of his interest in police boots, 
and he was caught trying to pick the lock of 
Buttony's cell. He was locked up, himself. But- 

[61] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

tony, despairing of rescue, confessed the secrets of 
the Hylo gang to the police captain. Plain clothes 
men gathered in the other boys. By midnight all 
the Hylos were behind bars, and the station house 
was besieged by their parents, their relatives, and 
their friends, all of whom were eloquent with the 
conviction of their own respectability and the 
prisoners' innocence. 

The captain of the precinct at the time was that 
Joe Mehlin who afterward became Superintendent 
of Police and a power in opposition to Big Dan — a 
pompadoured, red-haired disciplinarian with light- 
blue eyes that looked peculiarly cold in the setting 
of his sandy complexion. He was resolved to be 
revenged on the Hylos for the trouble they had 
given him. He was especially set on punishing Big 
Dan because he had found it impossible to break 
the boy down, to make him penitent, to make him 
cower. 

"You got us all wrong. Cap," Dan kept saying, 
cheerfully unawed. "We ain't crooks — none of 
us. It's a frame-up on the kid. He's no dip. An' 
he's so scared he don't know what he's talkin' about. 
He'd say any thin'." 

And the captain would reply: "All right, Reilly. 
Then I'll send you all up. You can't make a fool o' 
me. You'll get five years fer this." 

The other boys took their tone from Dan. His 
attempt to rescue Buttony had been the final act of 
daring that had made a melodramatic hero of him. 

[62] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



They stood behind him solidly. It was all or none. 
And by morning the accumulated political influence 
of the whole neighborhood, its Assemblyman, its 
priests, and its Senator was settling down in a 
menacing pressure on the police captain. 

He stood out so long that his final collapse was 
all the more humiliating to him, and he consoled 
himself by giving Big Dan a brutal measure of the 
third degree before he released the boy. 

"Listen here, Cap," Reilly said, when he had 
reached the safety of the station-house door, "I'll 
get yuh fer this some day, an' I'll get yuh good." 

Of course, he kept his promise. Among the peo- 
ple whom he represents it is a point of honor to 
avenge an injury as faithfully as to reward a friend. 
It is the whole duty of a moral life to be "no quitter" 
and "no ingrate." 

And poor Buttony was forever damned in the 
eyes of the district by being both a quitter and an 
ingrate. He had confessed, and he had betrayed 
his friends. He tried to regain his standing in the 
world by recanting his confession everywhere. He 
told his parents that it was false, that he had been 
frightened into it. And Dan assisted him, at home, 
by assuring Mary Gatecliff that they were all 
innocent, particularly Buttony. She believed him; 
she accepted his attempt to rescue her brother as a 
deed of romantic faithfulness that had been done 
for her as much as for Buttony; and she rewarded 
Dan by letting him kiss her. 

[63} 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Her parents were less easily convinced. They 
saved Buttony from immediate purgatory at the 
hands of the Hylos by moving uptown to take him 
away from evil associates. Big Dan, after a touch- 
ing farewell to Mary, remained to enjoy his laurels. 

To tell the truth, he was relieved to have her go. 
She was older than he, and he had begun to find her 
too intense and humorless in her fixed idea of his 
devotion to her. He had not the temperament 
needed to make a humble cavalier. He forgot 
her, for the time. 

Buttony had learned that you cannot break the 
law without risking punishment. Big Dan had 
learned that you can escape punishment if you have 
influence enough to control the police. Buttony 
went to the Free Academy to be educated in the 
ethics of respectability; he studied law at Columbia; 
he became an agent of the Citizens' League; and he 
turned against his memories of his boyhood esca- 
pades with all the fervor of a convert repenting of 
his sins. Big Dan continued to take his education 
from the streets. 

6 

And here we approach the real heart of his mys- 
tery. When the Hylos were forced to dissolve, by 
the continued mtrusion of the police, Dan and his 
older followers were absorbed by the James Phelan 
Athletic Association — which was athletic in the way 
that the Y.M.C.A. is athletic, and political as the 

[64] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



Y.M.C.A. is religious. Its two glories were Jimmy 
Phelan, the district leader, and Kid McCann, the 
champion lightweight. Its membership included 
the politicians, the ward heelers, the pugilists, the 
gamblers, the professional crooks, the young sports, 
the political aspirants, and all the doubtful light 
and leading of the district. In its rooms and on the 
streets, after working hours. Big Dan became 
familiar with every form of common vice. Yet he 
practiced none of them. Why? 

He had promised his mother that he would not 
use either tobacco or alcohol until he was twenty- 
one, but why did he keep the promise .f^ He had 
directed the Hylos in all their boyish raids and 
depredations, but why did he never join in their 
petty thieving .f^ The young bloods of the Phelan 
Association put him in the way of becoming a prize 
fighter and trained him for the ring. Why did he 
never take to that ambition? Why did he continue 
working in the press room on Park Row until he 
was elected Assemblyman from his district? What 
was the secret of his strength of will that carried him 
to one ambition and not to another, that kept him 
above weaknesses which he never seemed to con- 
demn, that made him the king of the underworld — 
as it had made him the leader of the Hylos — but 
preserved him from being, in the professional sense 
of the word, a "crook"? 

Well, Big Dan, even as a child, had a bodily 
superiority that made him admired and compli- 

[65 1 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

merited, and I believe it was this first sense of 
physical importance that formed the backbone of 
his personality. His early leadership among his 
companions must have confirmed his innate con- 
viction of natural eminence. Certainly he developed 
a sort of instinct of aristocracy that showed in his 
mother, too, in her inordinate almsgiving. As the 
head of the Hylos, he refrained from the thieving as 
the foreman of a work gang refrains from work. 
When Buttony was arrested and Dan went to re- 
lease him, it was from an obvious impulse of noblesse 
oblige. His promise that he would not smoke or 
drink he kept, as a boy, because he was fond of his 
mother; and he kept it, as he grew older, because 
his habits of abstinence were habits of which he 
became proud, since they were his habits, and dif- 
ferent from the prevailing habits around him. 
Moreover, in his experience of life, drunkenness 
was a form of weakness of which the predatory took 
advantage — as the Hylos rolled a rummy — and all 
those in his circle who pandered to vice exploited 
similar weaknesses. Big Dan had no intention of 
allowing himself to be exploited, and some obscure 
sense of responsibility for the weak prevented him 
from becoming an exploiter of them. He accepted 
training as a pugilist until he was expert enough 
to make anyone respect his blows, but he went no 
farther; he balked at being the fighting cock of a 
group of prize-ring promoters. He became one of 
the stalwarts who did the "strong-arm" work about 

[66 1 



BIG DAN REILLY 



the polls, prevented members of the opposing party 
from casting their votes, and supplied the conse- 
quent vacancy with a loyal impersonator when a 
rival voter had been carried home. Among his 
people, this sort of activity is regarded as good 
exercise for a growing lad, and Big Dan took plenty 
of it. But he did not himself impersonate; he was 
too conspicuous, physically. When he became ward 
captain he did not, himself, buy votes; he received 
the money and disbursed it to his craftier lieuten- 
ants. And his sense of superiority and of responsi- 
bility slowly promoted him to a leadership and an 
authority which his amiable good nature kept 
beneficent and popular. 

His mother aided him throughout. Her pride in 
him was colossal; she may have helped to lay the 
foundations of his nature with that pride. She 
trusted him and leaned on him even in his school 
days; and it may have been this that made him 
responsible. She was a wise judge of character; 
she knew the affairs of the whole neighborhood; 
and her gossip was an education to him. When she 
gave anything out of her charity, she always said, 
"This is from Danny, now," and Danny got the 
credit of it. When he became captain of his ward, 
she acted as his chief of staff and busied herself all 
day "lookin' to his finces," as she called it, while 
he was away at his work. She reported to him at 
supper, while he ate her cooking, and he would say, 
grinning: *'If2/ow ain't the crafty one! Would yuh 

[67] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

like to run fer the Presidency? Tip me the wink 
an' I'll speak to Phelan." 

"You an' yer Phelan," she would reply. "I c'u'd 
get it from him quicker than yeh c'u'd, yerself." 

"That's true enough, y' oV ward heeler," he would 
admit. And it was. 

Their intercourse was conducted in this disre- 
spectful tone of rough banter that served to dis- 
guise the shamefacedness of an idolatrous love. 

She had been prematurely gray as a young 
woman. Now she was white haired. Dan called 
her "Granny" to tease her, and she had become 
"Granny" affectionately to the whole ward. They 
came to her for every sort of advice and assistance. 
They came to her with their quarrels, and she lis- 
tened to both sides and sympathized with both, but 
joined neither. It was her private boast that she had 
never had a quarrel in her life. She had an in- 
exhaustible tolerance, and I do not believe she ever 
passed an adverse moral judgment on anybody who 
was not rich. "Poor people has to make a livin'," 
she would say, in forgiveness of all her neighbors' 
notorious delinquencies; and yet she was a devout 
churchgoer and prayed for Danny morning, noon, 
and night. 

She was popular with the mothers, who are the 
real heads of the families in the tenements. The 
men are too often stupefied by hard labor and 
alcoholic recreation. They are less ambitious than 
their wives; they have a weaker sense of responsi- 

[68] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



bility to their children; they do not endure poverty 
so hardily; they die younger. "Granny" Reilly 
was the confidante and adviser, the visiting nurse 
and Lady Bountiful, of every mother, wife, and 
widow in the neighborhood; and they were all "for 
her" and for her son. It was her influence as much 
as anything that elected him to the legislature. 



That happened in 1887, when he was twenty- 
four years old. And one of the first results of it was 
to bring Mary Gatecliff back into his life. She 
wrote, congratulating him on his election, formally. 
He went to call on her, because he was an awkward 
letter writer and he had self-confidence enough to go 
anywhere. He did not hesitate even when he 
found the Gatecliffs living on West Twenty-third 
Street in one of the houses of London Terrace 
that still maintained the tradition of the row's 
earlier magnificence. 

Gatecliff had become a wholesale grocer, with a 
string of retail shops; his wife had developed formal 
manners and a complete loss of hearing; Buttony 
had married a daughter of money and moved still 
farther uptown; and Mary Gatecliff was not at all 
the youngster who had kissed Dan good-by in the 
hallway on Hudson street. She had been to a finish- 
ing school. She was meditatively quiet, a solitary 
reader, silent and observant. It seemed impossible 

[69] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMEmCANS 

that she could ever have any but a feeling of kmdly 
superiority for Big Dan. She probably thought 
that she had written to him out of such a feeling. 

But Dan had once roused in her a tumultuous 
emotion, and he was the only man who had. That, 
I think, is the explanation of the affair that followed 
— one of those mysterious love affairs that are the 
despair of parents and the scandal of friends. Her 
intelligence had been educated out of all sympathy 
with him, but there was something else in her that 
had not. Her emotions responded to their old 
stimulus at sight of him, and she was struck with 
a flush and thrill that startled her. His voice shook 
her; she did not know why. He was aware of it. 
He had a compelling tone of confident familiarity, 
and he took her hand, smiling at her. He called 
her **Mary" cheerfully, and talked to her about 
her former neighbors and old times, with laughter. 
He seemed genuinely big hearted, human, rough, 
and winning. He was humorous about himself and 
his mother and his political "spiels" and his career. 
"She's so pop'lar," he said, "that they've elected 
me, I tell her she'll have to gi' me her proxy so's 
I c'n vote." And while Mary Gatecliff was critical 
of his slurred speech and his "Bowery mannerisms," 
she forgave them because, in the back of her mind, 
she was thinking that they could be easily corrected. 

She parted from him with a girlish friendliness 
of manner that would have seemed impossible to 
her a few hours earlier. She hurried to bed and 

[70] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



then lay awake, excited, far into the night, with 
her reason apparently cool about him, but her 
emotions deeply stirred. 

And it was not many days before her reason took 
the tone of her emotion. She believed that Abra- 
ham Lincoln might have been such a young poli- 
tician as Dan if Lincoln had been less melancholy. 
Dan was of the people, uneducated, a poor boy; 
but she knew that most of the leaders of the nation 
had been that. She began to feel that what he 
most needed was a friend with high ideals and the 
culture of a better class to influence and guide him. 

She wrote him again, sending him a book of which 
she had spoken to him. Her father saw him on 
his second visit, but her father's business had given 
him a great respect for the financial virtue of po- 
litical influence, and he was pleasant to the young 
Assemblyman. Her mother saw him; but her 
mother, being deaf, talked unceasingly to cover her 
infirmity. She seemed rather more than pleasant. 
Dan was used to having people pleasant to him; it 
did not impress him. Mary talked to him of his 
plans and his ambitions, with an encouraging in- 
terest. He was not unused to young feminine 
interest, either. He jollied her as he jollied his 
mother; and because he was leaving for Albany next 
day he put his arm around her at parting, and kissed 
her good-by as he might have kissed his mother. 

She wrote him in Albany, a letter that accepted 
her surrender to his caress as if it had been the last 

[71] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

surrender of love. He was deeply moved by it. It 
was the sort of letter that only an intense and 
idealistic girl can write when all her barriers are 
broken down. Dan replied clumsily, jocularly, but 
in terms which he had never before been able to use 
to anyone but his mother. 

8 

He arrived at the legislature like a fraternity 
athlete entering a college where friends have pre- 
ceded him. It was a legislature that was acclaimed 
by the newspapers of the day the "most corrupt, 
discreditable, unprincipled, and venal that ever 
assembled in the capital of any civilized com- 
munity." Big Dan and his friends were as little 
worried by that criticism as if they were the class 
of '87 being scolded by their teachers. He attended 
committee meetings and debates as a college 
"sport" attends lectures. He had nothing but 
good-natured contempt for Buttony Gatecliff — now 
Harold A. Gatecliff, agent of the Citizens' League — 
whom he found lobbying in support of various re- 
form measures. In Dan's eyes Gatecliff had become 
a studious and spectacled prig, and after one 
unpleasant interview they agreed to go their sepa- 
rate ways. It never occurred to Dan that Buttony 
might be dangerous. And he did not mention Mary 
to him. That, he thought, was no affair of Buttony's. 

The legislators were "doing business on a basis 

172] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



of from Rve dollars upward." Some of the up- 
state members were quoted at one hundred dollars 
each. Big Dan organized a "union to maintain 
prices" among the New York and Brooklyn mem- 
bers, and they got as high as five hundred dollars 
each for their votes. They helped to pass a bill to 
free insurance companies from back taxes of $700,- 
000 and future taxes of $200,000 a year. Big Dan 
voted for it gayly. He voted to expend a million 
and a half for patent ballot boxes, to the sole profit 
of the firm that made them and the members who 
voted for them. For his constituency he obtained 
a free public bath and permission for newspaper 
vendors to erect news stands "within the stoop 
line" on New York City streets. He helped to 
introduce a number of "strike bills" — which are 
bills threatening to penalize corporations that are 
rich enough and timid enough to pay for immunity. 
He made his mark as a humorist at committee meet- 
ings. His union to maintain prices became known 
as "the Black Horse Cavalry," and he led it as 
ably as he had led the Hylos. He had more money 
than his mother could give away; he bought her an 
old red-brick house in the Greenwich Village 
quarter; and he financed his first saloon, with one 
of his boyhood friends as its proprietor. His politi- 
cal influence protected it from the police. Alto- 
gether, his first year in the legislature was happy and 
profitable in a boyish and innocent sort of way — 
"innocent" in his eyes, that is. 

[73] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

His affair with Mary Gatecliff ran along less 
happily for her than for him, since she found herself 
committed to a man who remained obviously more 
free than she. His affection had no vows. It did 
not even find words for itself. And it masked its 
sincerity in boyish grins and clumsy playfulness. 
She trembled when he kissed her, suffocated by the 
beating of her heart; and then she wept, when he was 
gone, because she could neither resist him nor ap- 
parently make him respect the weakness that yielded 
to him. She denied her feeling for him to her father. 
She could not, in self-respect, admit the humiliating 
terms of it. "We're just friends," she said. 

Love, to her, was something abstract and tran- 
scendental, of the nature of a religion, exacting in its 
worship and rather solemn. To Dan it was a merely 
human relation. He took her affection as he took 
his mother's. He repaid it — as he repaid his 
mother's — with rough kindliness when he was with 
her and devoted thoughts when he was away. And 
he left the unconsidered future to develop itself 
and their relations, sure of himself and his success. 

9 

So he came to the crisis and the turning point in 
his career. Imagine him a burly twenty-six, rubi- 
cund and round-faced, well dressed, prosperous, 
known to everybody m his district and liked by them 
all. His passage down his native street was a tri- 

174] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



umphal progress. The policeman on the beat 
saluted him. . The loafers on the saloon corners 
stopped him to borrow money. The street children 
pointed him out and followed him. The shop- 
keepers shook hands with him. He was buttonholed 
and solicited by constituents and office seekers, and 
he released himself with a broad smile and a pat on 
the shoulder and such promises as he knew he could 
keep. He smiled at the girls, with his hat on the 
back of his head. He touched the brim of it with a 
wave of the hand when their mothers greeted him. 
He joked with the priest. A universal favorite, as 
kindly as a prince who wishes to be popular, he 
walked with the sun on his face and a prosperous 
future before him. And he never looked back at 
the past that followed him — an invisible figure, 
which he thought nobody saw, because he never 
looked at it himself — until suddenly that figure 
stepped up beside him, took his arm firmly, and 
walked him into a future that was a sinister coun- 
terfeit of all he had expected. 

There was to be a centennial celebration in New 
York City in 1889, and in April of that year a bill 
was introduced at Albany to give the city police the 
power to arrest suspected criminals at sight, so as to 
protect the centennial crowds from pickpockets 
and street walkers and hold-up men. Big Dan 
opposed the bill on the legitimate grounds that nc 
man or woman should be arrested unless upon 
specific charges. He fought the bill in committee. 
6 [75] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

He fought it on the floor of the house. He rallied 
his Black Horse Cavalry against it, traded influence 
to defeat it, and "swapped" votes. 

Unfortunately, Inspector Mehlin was behind the 
bill, and so was the Citizens' League. Mehlin called 
in the newspaper men and gave them an interview 
in which he described Big Dan as "the associate 
of thieves and criminals," "a political crook, prize 
fighter, and strong-arm man," "opposed to the bill 
because all the criminals were his friends and if the 
bill went through it would hurt his saloon business." 
And the secretary of the Citizens' League followed 
with a sketch of Big Dan's life, supplied by Gate- 
cliff: "Born amid the most depraved surroundings 
. . . the leader of a gang of young ruffians known 
to the police as the Hylo gang ... his manners 
and speech those of the typical 'tough' . . . the 
companion of thieves and prostitutes . . . his 
saloons their known resorts . . . perhaps the most 
dangerous man that New York City ever sent to 
Albany . . . the recognized leader of that group 
of piratical Assemblymen know as *the Black Horse 
Cavalry' . . . the king of the underworld ... a 
political brigand holding his followers together by 
the cohesive power of public plunder," etc., etc. 

Big Dan woke next morning to find himself 
infamous. In vain he denied the statements on the 
floor of the house. He was not convincing. He 
would not desert his friends, Barney This and Fitzey 
That, thieves and burglars, whom Mehlin had 

1761 



BIG DAN REILLY 



named. He admitted that he knew them, but denied 
that his friendship was guilty. He could not deny 
his leadership of the Black Horse. Not to their 
faces. He spoke lamely and confusedly. He de- 
feated the bill, but he did not clear himself. He 
could not. Mehlin had made too picturesque and 
colorful a figure of him. The Albany correspondents 
took it up. The editorial writers enlarged on it. 
And Dan's place in the social system was forever 
fixed. 

He did not realize it. It was years before he 
realized it. 

Mary Gatecliff saw her brother, learned the trutJi, 
about the Hylos and about the legislature, and 
wrote to Dan: "It is terrible. There is nothing I 
can say. Do not come again. I could not trust 
myself to speak to you." And when he called she 
would not see him; and when he wrote she did not 
answer. 

That cut him to the vitals. He could not picture 
any circumstances in which he would have turned 
his back on Mary before her enemies. It put her in 
a class with her brother; they had "a yellow 
streak." 

Dan's criminal associates had not. They rallied 
to him. They elected him vice-president of the 
Phelan Association, and made speeches to him as 
"the man who never went back on a friend." The 
underworld had found a champion; they crowded 
to his saloon. The neighbors came to assure his 

[77] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

mother that whatever the lying police and the news- 
papers might say, they knew that Danny was a good 
boy. Most significant of all, Cass Harley came. 

And with Cass Harley, Dan's future took him by 
the arm. Harley was then a corporation lawj^er, 
lobbyist, and "fixer." The Black Horse Cavalry 
had been worrying him and his clients. He came to 
make peace. He came to offer Dan an alliance with 
the financial powers upon whom, as a piratical 
Assemblyman, Dan had been preying. 

**We need a leader in the legislature, Dan," he 
said. "The boys won't follow Cassidy. You and 
your friends had us blocked a half dozen times last 
session, and it's going to be worse now. We need 
you and we can take care of you." 

Dan asked, only, "Can you get Mehlin fer me?" 

"Yes," Harley promised, "we can get Mehlin. 
And we can stop most of this newspaper stuff." 

"I don't care about the papers," Dan said. 
"They can't hurt me down here. But I want 
Mehlin's scalp. He lied about me." 

"We all know that," Harley assured him, 
although he was there because he believed what 
Mehlin had said. "Tell me, can we help your 
organization in any way? Need any campaign 
contributions? " 

"I'll see y' about that later." Dan rose heavily, 
to end the interview. "Get Mehlin first." 

Harley nodded. "It may take me a little time. 
I'll begin right away." 

[78] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



He "got" Mehlin. He got him so painfully that 
Mehlin came to Dan, in an attempt to save himself, 
and apologized and begged for his place. That 
simply made him *'a quitter." Dan went down 
into his change pocket and drew out some silver. 

"Mehlin," he said, "you once ga' me a quarter 
more'n I'd earned blackin' boots. It was the only 
decent thing y' ever did. Take it, an' get out 
before I throw y' out. We're quits." 

Here was Reilly's first conspicuous public display 
of power. It marked him as an autocrat to the 
underworld. It brought a thousand willing agents 
to his service. And with these adherents at one end 
of the social system and Cass Harley and his 
clients at the other, he was supported by a com- 
bination of influence that was invincible. He was 
made the political boss of his district. He was no 
longer " Big Dan " ; he was "the Big One." When 
Jimmy Phelan died, the Phelan Association became 
the Dan Reilly Association, with Granny Reilly as 
the empress dowager behind the throne. Under her 
direction as much as Dan's, it developed into a 
political association for the distribution of dis- 
criminating alms. An oflicial chaplain attended 
marriages, christenings, and funerals to leave 
flowers "from Big Dan." A dispossess man went 
to court every morning for lists of evicted ten- 
ants and gave them aid. A recognized place finder 
occupied himself getting work for voters from 
every business man and corporation in New York 

[79] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

that could be reached by the Big One; and with Cass 
Harley to assist, there were few that could not be 
reached. But, unlike any of his predecessors in such 
a situation, Reilly did not sell out to the powers 
whom Harley served. He did not even lose himself 
among the higher-ups. He stuck to his district. He 
spoke of sacred Headquarters as "the dead man's 
rest," and kept away from it. He poured great 
sums of money through the Dan Reilly Association 
into the needy purses of his constituents, and took 
from them, in return, their votes. Thanks to his 
mother, he had made, unconsciously, an important 
discovery in the science of democratic government — 
a discovery that put him at last on the balcony at 
Headquarters. It was this : 

Among business men, farmers, manufacturers, 
and such, a voter marks his ballot in support of the 
party that gives him either a policy or a tariff to 
protect his livelihood. But there are no farmers or 
manufacturers or accumulations of invested capital 
among the tenement dwellers. Wlien those people 
vote for the party that assures their livelihood, they 
vote for the party that gives them jobs. Big Dan's 
political machine became an organization that 
gave the workingman, the poor, the unemployed, 
and the petty criminal work or money or protection 
in exchange for their votes.. Reilly became the 
Hanna of his party, locally. 

He was soon dictating to Cass Harley; and 
Harley, angered, assisted the newspapers and the 

[80] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



Citizens' League in an attempt to destroy him. 
They made the Big One a social outlaw, as pic- 
turesque as Robin Hood; but he polled an over- 
whelming vote in his district, dictated terms to 
Harley's clients, and ended Harley's political career. 
Then he reached for the principal backers of the 
Citizens' League and forced them to drop Gate- 
cliff, who as its secretary, had directed the publicity 
against him. He even fought the party Boss and 
defeated him in a characteristic activity. 

The Boss was interested m horse breeding and 
racing; his henchmen introduced a bill at Albany to 
suppress pool rooms because pool rooms hurt the 
race tracks by making it unnecessary to go to the 
races in order to bet; and Reilly, leading the pool 
room forces, proposed another bill making all bet- 
ting illegal, whether on the tracks or in the pool 
rooms. The reformers flocked to Reilly's support. 
The Boss, in order to get Big Dan to withdraw his 
bill, had to withdraw his own. He never forgave 
Big Dan and was never asked to. "What do I care 
fer Headquarters," Reilly laughed. "I can carry 
my distric' whether I'm in th' organization er not." 
He carried it when a reform wave engulfed the party 
in every other district of the city, and it was he who 
served notice on the Boss that his abdication was 
expected as a consequence of that defeat. 

He was now at the point where he should have 
been able to assume the crown of his career. And 
he could not touch it. Mehlin and Gatecliff and 

[81] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Cass Harley and the Citizens' League had done 
their work too well. The rival leaders at Head- 
quarters could not oppose his power, but they did 
not conceal from him the obvious fact that to put a 
man of his reputation on the party throne would 
mean the public ruin of the party. The reform 
wave was still running high. 

"Better fake up a stool pigeon, Dan," they 
advised him, "an* work behind him till this blows 
over. We know it ain't true, what they say of yuh. 
But the public don't know it." 

In the secret silences of his thought he blamed 
it all on Gatecliff, and whatever business or under- 
taking Gatecliff entered on he contrived to blight 
it, mysteriously. Mary Gatecliff tried to see him. 
She wrote to ask for an interview. He did not 
answer. She persisted with a letter begging him 
not to ruin her brother. He muttered, "What do 
you two think yuh've done to mef and threw the 
letter in the waste basket. 

When Mary married the head of the traction 
company, he watched for Buttony to appear in 
the company's affairs; and when Gatecliff showed 
as a confidential legal adviser to the presi- 
dent of the concern, Dan set a new trap in the 
shape of a traction franchise with which he intended 
to "gold brick" them. Gatecliff, persecuted as 
he had been in his youth, was willing again to pay 
tribute. He undertook negotiations with Head- 
quarters, and Dan handed him over to a lieutenant. 

[82] 



BIG DAN REILLY 



The price was agreed upon, but the company offered 
stock, and Dan would not move except for half the 
amount in ready money paid in advance. He planned 
to accept that bribe and then secretly to manip- 
ulate the legislature to refuse the franchise. The 
traction heads had to take his word as his bond. 
He had never broken his word in the past, and 
everybody knew it. 

10 

It was toward the end of these negotiations that 
he came to his dramatic moment on the Head- 
quarters stairs. 

He came there in black because he had been to 
the funeral of his mother. He came there feeling 
suddenly empty, bitter, resentful — empty of all 
ambition to remain in control at Headquarters, 
now that his mother was no longer alive to be proud 
of his power; bitter because of the public obloquy 
under which both he and his mother had suffered; 
and resentful toward those best men of the com- 
munity who dreaded him, despised him, and waited 
on him. As he had walked down the aisle of the 
church, behind his mother's coffin, he had seen 
Mary Gatecliff in a pew, and she had looked at him 
with sympathy, with pity, with a pleading reproach. 
He had said to himself, *'Her husband made her 
come, to jolly me along." But he knew better. 
Her eyes were the strained eyes of a victim of dis- 
illusion, looking at a fellow sufferer in unhappiness, 

183] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

and mutely asking him, in the face of death, why 
they had so maimed each other's lives. 

The look accused him and accused herself. It 
forgave him and asked forgiveness. And with that 
look in his memory he paused on the railed landing 
of the stairs and saw her brother and her husband 
below him, waiting hopefully for the word from him 
that would spring the fall of his trap. He despised 
them. He was ashamed of himself and of them. 
He wanted to insult them contemptuously while he 
saved them. And he wanted to slap their whole re- 
spected world in the face. And he slapped it. 
"The rest o' yuh can go home." 

11 

It was his last official act at Headquarters. "I'm 
sick," he told the man who was to succeed him. 
"An' I'm through here. That deal with Gatecliff 
and his bunch, that's off. If anyone wants to see 
me, tell 'em to go to hell." 

He retired to one of his Bowery lairs and took to 
his bed. The painted woman who was nursing him 
persuaded him to drink some hot toddy, to put him 
to sleep. It went to his head and he talked of his 
mother. 

"I had a funny feelin' up there at the cemet'ry," 
he said. "They buried her on the side of a hill. 
An' the sun was shinin'. An' they dug the grave 
like a box, cuttin' it down straight on the sides an' 

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BIG DAN REILLY 



makin' the corners square, you know, like a box. 
An' the shell just fitted into it like it was made fer 
it. An' there was somethin' about the look o' that 
grave, an' the way it was made, that all of a sudden 
made me feel contented about havin' her in it — 
somethin', you know, consolin.' An' when they 
lowered her into it the shell fitted so tight that the 
air came up slow, an' when she settled down in it 
it made a sort o' sigh, like you're happy." He began 
to weep. "I never knew a grave c'u'd be like that. 
It — it looked comfor'ble." 

"Now," the woman said, impatiently, **you 
ain't goin' to talk about graves bein' comfortable. 
You ain't as sick as all that. You got nothin' but 
a cold." 

And Big Dan, like a great child, motherless, 
rolled over and covered his face with the pillow 
and sobbed. 

One of the frankest of our foreign critics wrote of 
Dan at the height of his power: **He is a living 
proof that the workingman believes he has the same 
right to vote for work that the business man has to 
vote for trade. He indicates that in a democracy 
where all are politically free the wage slave will sell 
his political freedom to ameliorate the conditions of 
his economic servitude. He signifies that poverty 
can organize and follow its leader and plunder 
property unabashed by all the moral fulminations 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

of its victim. He means that no reform movement 
can permanently defeat his kind until the reformers 
recognize that the voter on the lower East Side has 
the same right to sell his vote for a wage as the voter 
on the upper West Side has to sell his vote for an 
income." 

And all oi that may be true, but I think if this 
social philosopher had seen Dan blubbering into a 
pillow, he might have understood that the Big One 
was what he was because he had never been any- 
thing but an overgrown boy, with merely boyish 
ideals of loyalty to his gang, with a boy's immature 
sense of responsibility to society, with all a boy's 
unsocialized ego instincts, and a boy's dependence 
on affection, and a boy's hatred for his censors, and 
a boy's revolt against his punishment. 



III. MRS. MURCHISON 



YOU remember Mrs. Murcliison.f* No. I suppose 
not. Her death in a London air raid, in July, 
1916, recalled her to the memory of the American 
newspaper morgues for only two or three sticks of 
an obituary. And the name of her son. Major 
Wallace Bruce, printed in the British casualty lists 
later in the same year, went unremarked even by 
our newspapers, so far as I saw. Yet Mrs. Mur- 
chison and her son were once very distinguished 
Americans. If she had died in July, twenty years 
ago, every front page on the continent would have 
displayed her name in the largest type of the day. 
She had achieved distinction in the way that is most 
open to an American woman — she had married a 
rich man and been accused of murdering him. 

She rather marred that distinction, finally, by 
being found "not guilty" — if you remember. And 
if you do not remember, you have forgotten proba- 
bly because of the very fact that she was found not 
guilty. She failed to reach the ultimately memo- 
rable elevation of the electric chair; and, as an inno- 
cent woman wrongly suspected of murder, she ended 
by being proved unworthy of that natural human 
interest in miisee monsters with which you had read 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

of her, so that you would be justified in dismissing 
her from your memory as one of life's minor dis- 
appointments of romantic hope. 

I am venturing to recall her to you now because 
I have learned that she was guilty. She killed her 
husband. And she killed him in cold blood. 

2 

That fact, if I may say so, makes her a perfect 
specimen for my purposes. She had already every- 
thing else to make her perfect. She was intelligent. 
She was rich. She was well educated and well 
dressed. She had the manners of a gentlewoman. 
And she was, above all, appealingly pretty. When 
she first appeared in court an audible breath of 
surprised pity exhaled like a gasp from the crowd in 
the court room, .and throughout the trial public 
sympathy fairly brooded over her in an attentive 
silence as she spoke, or buzzed in suppressed resent- 
ful whispers over the testimony of the witnesses 
against her. 

For me, it was not so much her beauty that was 
moving — the beauty of a small dark woman with 
large eyes and the sort of infantile nose that stirs 
the protective strain in masculine affection irre- 
sistibly. What did for me was her contralto voice 
when she took the stand in her own defense. It 
was a thrilling, throaty voice, full of husky catches, 
tremulous and yet strongly frank. It was a strange 

188] 



M 



MRS. MURCHISON 



voice to issue from such a frail and inexpressive 
figure. And it was accompanied by no dramatic 
gesture whatever. Once she made as if to raise her 
hand in protest against some unnecessarily offensive 
questions which the prosecuting attorney asked her, 
but she let it fall back again into her lap, where the 
other hand clasped it with an odd effect of comfort- 
ing it silently. And I seem to remember her slowly 
shaking her head as she answered, in her deepest 
tones: "No. No. No." But for the most part 
she sat motionless, pale, listening with mute atten- 
tion and replying with the slightest possible move- 
ment of the lips, as if everything had been exhausted 
in her but her remarkable voice that seemed to come 
out of the depths of a forlorn spirit, shaken but 
innocent and not afraid. 

It was impossible to associate such a voice with 
a guilty conscience. And even before we had heard 
her voice — in fact, before the jury was impaneled — 
Al ("Porky") Orpen of the Sun was willing to bet 
that she would be acquitted, and only Tom Mc- 
Quade of the World would take him on it. Orpen, 
of course, was playing a sympathetic hunch; he 
knew nothing of the case; he had been sent to the 
trial as what would now be called a "sob artist," 
though his sobbing was sufficiently subdued by 
literary artistry to be acceptable even to the old 
Sun. McQuade was using his reason. He had been 
on the story of the murder from the day it broke. 
"She's guilty," he said. "No one else could have 

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killed him. Wait till you hear the evidence." 
Throughout the trial, he and Orpen argued with 
each other contemptuously whenever a recess gave 
them the opportunity. And although their con- 
flicting advocacy did not affect the jury, it is im- 
portant to this study of Mrs. Murchison, for out 
of McQuade's obstinate belief in her guilt there 
came to me the first grounds of proof that she was 
guilty. 

Most important of all — though you have probably 
forgotten this, too — she was defended by Justin 
Littlejohn, who was then so far from being famous 
that McQuade was the only one of us at the press 
table who had ever seen him in court before. He 
appeared as a large, leisurely, prematurely bald 
young man with an indolent manner in repose and 
a deceptive air of simplicity. His opponent was a 
fighting lawyer, eloquent and dramatic, who seemed 
to be setting a ring pace that was too fast for poor 
Littlejohn. He objected incessantly to Littlejohn's 
questions, and Littlejohn did not seem to have the 
punch to break through this interference. He would 
say, dispiritedly: **If my learned friend objects, I 
withdraw the question." Or: "My client and I 
wish only to bring out the facts. I will put the 
question in any form that will be acceptable to the 
other side." He let the prosecution ask Mrs. Mur- 
chison questions that the judge himself objected to, 
and he listened silently to the wrangle that ensued. 
When he rose to address the jury, it was after a 

[90] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



peroration from the state attorney that mobilized 
all the emotions of melodrama and sent them storm- 
ing over the lines of the defense with horse, foot, and 
artillery; and Littlejohn spoke, upon the reverber- 
ations of that uproar, dryly at first, and then con- 
fidentially, with an air of earnest candor, as if he 
were arguing a proposition in Euclid upon which a 
life depended, laying all his cards solemnly on the 
table at last, and ending: "Gentlemen, there is 
the truth as far as we know it. It is for you to 
decide." 

I should not have observed him with any intelli- 
gent interest at all if McQuade had not announced, 
halfway through the trial, "He'll get her off!" 

"He'll get her off," Orpen chuckled, "because 
she's innocent." 

"Change attorneys with me," McQuade chal- 
lenged, like the Irish after the Boyne, "and I'll lick 
you hands down. This man's a great criminal 
lawyer." 

Orpen laughed. "Hear Mac hunting an alibi!" 

None of us liked McQuade — he was too cocksure 
and egotistic; but we all respected his intelligence. 
Accordingly, we began to study Littlejohn like a 
clinic of dramatic critics dissecting a new Hamlet. 
And I decided — as dramatic critics will — that if 
Littlejohn was not merely "playing himself," he 
was a genius. That is to say, I realized that if he 
was not whole-souledly convinced of his client's 
innocence, he was simulating the exterior of such a 
7 [91] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

conviction with incredible art. But then, I believed 
that she was innocent. 

I saw only one doubtful indication that Little John 
was playing a part. It was when Mrs. Murchison 
was being cross-examined by the attorney for the 
state. We had been watching Little John to see 
whether he showed any nervousness while the 
prosecution picked and pulled at her story. He 
showed nothing but a massive and inert confidence. 
Suddenly, in the midst of her account of her married 
relations, she referred to her husband as her 
"father," and Littlejohn dropped his eyes to the 
papers on the table before him. The state attorney 
corrected her. "You mean your husband," he said. 
She replied, "Yes," but obviously without being 
aware that she was being corrected. A moment 
later she said "my father" again. The lawyer 
asked, sarcastically, "Why do you refer to Mr. 
Murchison as vour father.^" She looked at him 
bewildered, with a queer, confused expression, as 
if she realized that she had been thinking of Mur- 
chison as her father. She murmured, at last, "I 
don't know." 

The state attorney let it pass with a sort of con- 
temptuous sniff. Littlejohn had not raised his eyes 
from the table. His face had not changed a muscle. 
But his ears had turned as red as a guilty school- 
boy's. 

I could make nothing significant out of it at the 
time; but as I look back at it now I recognize it as 

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MRS. MURCHISON 



the one betrayal Littlejohn made of the fact that he 
knew her story and was afraid she might expose her- 
self inadvertently. 

3 

Her husband, as you may recall, was old Lucias 
Murchison, who began life as a telegraph operator 
and ended as the controlling owner of great accumu- 
lations of telegraph and telephone stock. He was 
almost as eccentric a figure in Wall Street as Russell 
Sage. He guarded his privacy from newspaper in- 
trusion so jealously that it was a public surprise 
when the murder trial disclosed that Mrs. Murchi- 
son had once been his private secretary. She was 
his second wife and he was her second husband. 
He had had a family of daughters by his first mar- 
riage, but he was estranged from them. She had 
had a son, romantically named Wallace Bruce — her 
first husband having been one "Aleck" Bruce, a 
court stenographer — and Wallace was living in the 
Murchison household at the time of the murder. 

Murchison was killed in his country house near 
Bedlington, and the trial was held at the county 
seat. The New York newspapers sent reporters, of 
course; and there was an audience of fashionable 
women from their suburban homes in the hills; but 
the crowd was a farm crowd that was larger in bad 
weather than when the conditions were good for fall 
plowmg, and the intelligence of the jiu-y was as 
difficult to appraise as a country jury's always is. 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

The state attorney kept presenting them with the 
dilemma: "If she did not kill him, who did? No 
one else could have done it." Littlejohn persisted 
in the simple reiteration : " She is innocent. We do 
not know who killed him, but she is innocent." 

It was an easy line of defense to take, but not so 
easy to maintain in the face of the evidence. 

Murchison had been found dead on the floor of 
his bedroom with his throat cut. All the doors of 
his room had been locked on the inside and he was 
lying near the door of the bathroom that communi- 
cated with his wife's room. His razor, from the 
bathroom shelf, was found in his bed, and the blood 
on the pillows made it probable that his throat had 
been cut while he slept. Blood and fingerprints on 
the knob and key of the bathroom door indicated 
that he had staggered from his bed to close and lock 
that door, and had fainted while he was trying to 
get back to another door to summon help from the 
hall. And there was a written note on his dresser 
top — a note in an unformed • girlish backhand — 
saying: "God is not mocked. Pray for me." 

Mrs. Murchison, suffering from insomnia, had 
obtained some sleeping tablets from her phj^sician 
on the previous day; she had taken several of these 
before going to bed that night; and she had evidently 
taken an overdose, because her maid had been un- 
able to waken her in the morning, had knocked 
frantically on Murchison's door, and, failing to 
arouse him, either, had telephoned for the doctor. 

[94] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



It was some time before the physician succeeded in 
bringing Mrs. Murchison back to consciousness. 
In the meantime the servants had forced Murchi- 
son' s door and found him murdered. 

At first, rumor had it that Mrs. Murchison had 
killed her husband and tried to kill herself. But 
the amazing message on the dresser was not in her 
handwriting. She wrote a very professional, flowing 
and secretarial, Spencerian script. And if she had 
intended to make a confession and kill herself, why 
should she disguise her writing .^^ 

It was the theory of the prosecution that she had 
risen in the night, had entered her husband's room 
through the bathroom — taking his razor from the 
bathroom shelf — and had cut his jugular vein while 
he slept. The pain of the wound had wakened him. 
He had struggled with her and she had fled. He 
had locked his door against her and died while he 
was trying to call some one to his aid. The note on 
the dresser had been written by her, in a disguised 
hand, to cast suspicion elsewhere. And, to account 
for the overdose of the sleeping draught, it was 
charged that she had taken a first dose, risen in the 
night, written the message in a disguised hand, 
killed her husband, taken a second draught, and 
slept till the doctor brought her to. 

This was an arguable theory up to a certain point, 
but there were several difficulties with it. A maid 
had attended Mrs. Murchison in her rooms that 
night and had seen her prepare for bed. Mrs. 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Murchison had been cheerful at the prospect of 
getting a good night's rest. She had taken her 
medicine eagerly and fallen asleep within an hour — 
for the maid had returned to ask her some question 
about household matters, had found her asleep, 
and had turned out an electric light that was still 
burning on her bedside table. This maid testified 
that Mrs. Murchison, in the morning, was sleeping 
in the same nightgown in which she had retired, 
and that it bore no evidences whatever of any such 
bloody struggle as had apparently taken place in 
Murchison's room. The doctor testified that her 
hands and arms showed no scratches, no bruises. 
She had been working in the flower beds that after- 
noon. She was "very choice" about her hands, as 
the maid said. She had put lotion on them at night 
and had gone to bed in gloves, so as not to soil the 
pages of the book with which she intended to read 
herself to sleep. The book was on the coverlet and 
she still wore the gloves when she was wakened. 
They were put in evidence at the trial so that the 
jury might see there were no blood stains on them. 
They were old white gloves that showed no signs of 
ever having been cleaned. 

The prosecution tried to insinuate that she had 
worn gloves in order to overcome the danger of 
leaving fingerprints on the razor, on the door handle, 
or the paper on which she wrote, "God is not 
mocked." Littlejohn destroyed that insinuation 
with one earnest sentence in his summing-up: "If 

[96] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



a woman intended to murder her husband in gloves, 
so as to leave no fingerprints, she would hardly 
let her maid see her making her guilty preparations 
to that end; she would put on the gloves secretly 
and hide them when she took them off, and she 
would hardly choose gloves of white Jcid." 

Mrs. Murchison herself destroyed the probability 
that she had written the message on the dresser top. 
At the state attorney's direction, on the witness 
stand, she wrote and rewrote, **God is not mocked. 
Pray for me," over and over, with her gloves on and 
with them off, in an attempted backhand and even 
in a labored imitation of the guilty script. Nothing 
could overcome the difference between the faltering 
and unformed writing of the message and her own 
strong and professional chirography. The writing 
experts found certain letters in the message that 
resembled hers, but their testimony was no more 
convincing to a country jury than such testimony 
usually is. And when the prosecution made her 
son Wallace write the message — as if hoping to 
involve him as her tool in the crime — their effort 
was accepted as an admission that they knew Mrs. 
Murchison had not written it. 

It was scrawled, in lead pencil, on the back of an 
envelope addressed to Murchison. There had been 
a number of letters to him lying on the dresser, and 
the murderer had evidently taken the one nearest 
at hand. And there had been handy, too, a gold 
pocket pencil attached to a watch chain, which 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Murchison had placed there, with his watch, before 
he went to bed. No fingerprints were recognizable on 
the metal; it had been taken up carelessly by several 
persons before the detectives put it away for exam- 
ination. There was no blood on the envelope, but, of 
course, it was obvious that the message had been 
written before the murderer attacked Murchison. 

Altogether, there was no definite circumstantial 
evidence to connect Mrs. Murchison with the in- 
criminating note. It used the terms of religious 
fanaticism, and she was not even a church member. 
Had she ever heard the phrase, *^God is not 
mocked"? Yes. She had had the usual religious 
instruction in her youth. Her father had been a 
very devout man, and she thought she remembered 
him saying, "God is not mocked." She could not 
be sure. She thought it was a quotation from the 
Bible, but she could not place it. 

Her father, for religious reasons, objected to her 
marriage with her first husband, an agnostic. She 
ran away from home, and she never saw her father 
again. He died. After her marriage she ceased 
attending church. She did not think of religion 
very often, now. Did she believe in hell.'^ She did 
not know. She thought not. In her girlhood she 
had worried very much about things of that sort, 
but now she just tried *'to be kind and just to 
people and not to do anyone any harm." She did 
not think much about whether she would be pun- 
ished or rewarded in another world. 

198] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



*'Do you believe/' the prosecutor thundered, 
"that murder will be punished in the other world? " 

*'Yes," she said, wearily, *'I should think that 
would be, if anything was." 

He threatened her with an accusing forefinger. 
*' Don't you know it.f* Doesn't your conscience tell 
you.?" 

**I try not to judge people," she replied. "I 
don't feel capable of judging wisely. I'm not very 
intelligent." 

And it was impossible to decide whether or not 
she knew she had evaded him. 

When he first asked her to write the words, 
**God is not mocked. Pray for me," she hesitated 
and held back. He demanded, "You have some 
aversion to writing those words, have you?" And 
she answered, hoarsely: "Yes. I was fond of Mr. 
Murchison. He was very kind to me." 

This pitifully choked reply was received by the 
court room with a sibilant whisper of sympathy that 
was almost a hiss against the prosecutor. The judge 
said gravely, "It would be well if counsel conducted 
his cross-examination so as to give less the impres- 
sion of a * third degree.' " And the attorney for the 
state lost his temper, argued with the court, was 
rebuked, and turned sulky. 

Consequently, he approached, with some emo- 
tional handicap, the problem of proving Mrs. 
Murchison' s motive for the murder. He asked her 
whether she had married Murchison for money. 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

After a transparent pause for thought, she replied: 
*'I wanted a home for myself and Wallace. Mr. 
Murchison offered me one. I respected him. He 
was always considerate, gentle — " 

"Did you love him?" the attorney broke in. 

"I— I liked him," she said. "He was " 

"Did you love him?" 

"There are so many different sorts of love " 

"You know the sort I mean." 

"He was a good man " 

"Did you love him?" 

She thought a moment, as if examining herself, 
looking up at the dingy court-room window with 
unseeing eyes. Her face changed. "Why, yes," 
she said, deeply, as if realizing the truth for the 
first time. ''I think I did r 

The attorney tried to cover his discomfiture by 
asking, "Did you get the money you married him 
for?" 

Littlejohn interposed, "If the court will per- 
mit " 

"Objection sustained," the judge snapped. "There 
is no evidence that she married him for money." 

"Well, then," the prosecutor sneered, "was your 
allowance as large as you expected it to be?" 

"I hadn't expected anything definite," she ex- 
plained. "He paid all the household bills and left 
me a check for myself on the first of every month." 

"And your son? Did he have all the money he 
needed?" 

[1001 



MRS. MURCHISON 



"I never took money from Mr. Murchison for my 
son," she said. '*I supported him out of my allow- 
ance." 

"Did you have some feeling about taking money 
from Mr. Murchison for your son?" 

"Yes." 

"Why?" 

Well, it appeared — to summarize a tedious ex- 
amination — that she and Murchison had had a 
tacit disagreement about the boy's education, about 
her keeping him tied to her apron strings, about the 
way in which she mollycoddled him, and so forth. 
Murchison had evidently felt some jealousy of her 
devotion to the boy. And he was not very sympa- 
thetic with young people. He was just, but he was 
stern. She had often felt depressed because Mur- 
chison did not take the boy into his affection. It 
was the one thing in the world that had worried her. 

"As a result of this worry," the prosecutor asked 
her, "did you ever feel an impulse to kill your 
husband?" 

"If I had, she said, "I should have thought I 
was going insane." 

"Did you ever think that you would be happier 
if your husband were dead?" 

"No. I was happier than I had ever been before. 
My life hadn't been an easy one before my marriage 
to him." 

"Did you know that in case of his death you were 
entitled to a third of his estate under the law?" 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

"He was not unwell. We had never spoken of 
his death. I did not know anything about his 
financial affairs." 

"Did you know that you were entitled to a third 
of his estate?" 

"I didn't know how large the estate was." 

"I appeal to the court," he cried, exasperated, 
"to direct the witness to answer my question." 

The judge said, sourly, "She seems to be answer- 
ing the intent and purpose of it." 

"Did you know how large your I mean, 

did you know you were entitled to a third of your 
husband's estate.^^" 

"No," she said. "I thought it depended on his 
will." 

"Then you did think about his will, didnH you?" 

"Not till after he was dead. Then I wondered 
what was going to become of me." 

4 

Looking back on that cross-examination now — 
with what I have since learned — I recognize as 
guileful the way in which she avoided giving a 
direct answer to the prosecutor's question about 
whether she had ever felt an impulse to kill her 
husband. But I can recall no reserve of expression, 
no change of tone, to indicate where guile was 
hidden. Her manner throughout was the manner 
of an innocent, defenseless woman, grief-stricken, 

[102] 



MRS. MimCHISON 



resigned, and dignified. It was impossible for any 
merely human jury to find her guilty. 

But, if she had not killed her husband, who had? 

Murchison had been accustomed to lock all the 
doors of his bedroom except the door to the bath- 
room that communicated with his wife's chamber. 
And Mrs. Murchison usually locked the outer door 
of her room, too, so that their sleeping apartments 
were cut off from the rest of the house. She had 
gone to bed on this night before the maid had 
finished in the room. She had intended to rise and 
lock the door later, after she had read awhile, but 
the drug had evidently overcome her unexpectedly. 
The murderer, therefore, had had access to Murclii- 
son's room, from the hall, through her bedchamber. 
But if Murchison had not been attacked by her, 
why did he not go to her for aid.^^ Why, with his 
last effort, did he lock his door against her and try 
to summon assistance elsewhere? 

Why, indeed? 

The prosecution began its case by showing that 
the downstairs doors and windows had been locked 
all night. And the servants who opened them in 
the morning testified that none of them had been 
tampered with. Murchison's bedroom windows, on 
the second floor, had been open, but they were 
covered with wire fly screens that hooked on the 
inside. Mrs. Murchison's windows were similarly 
protected. There were no footprints in the flower 
beds beneath those windows, no ladder marks in 

[103] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

the mold, and no holes m the screens through which 
a man on a ladder could have reached the screen 
hooks. The outer doors were all fitted with old- 
fashioned locks, they could not be opened with 
latch keys, and all the big iron keys had been in 
their locks that morning. No one had entered the 
house from the outside till the doctor arrived. It 
seemed beyond doubt, therefore, that Murchison 
had been killed by some one in the family. 

But the servants, and their relations with Mur- 
chison, and the conditions in the family generally, 
were all as old-fashioned as the doors. Murchison 
had lived a simple, patriarchal sort of life in the 
country, surrounded by retainers who had been with 
him for years. The housekeeper, who was sixty 
years old, was the wife of the gardener, who was 
seventy. The dining-room maid and the housemaid 
were her nieces. Mrs. Murchison's maid was a 
simple-looking Irish girl, "just out from the old 
country," a relative and protegee of the coachman, 
who was a character in his own right. And so with 
the others. They were all put on the witness stand, 
and they added some comedy to the case, but 
their testimony made it impossible to believe that 
any of them could have killed Murchison. They 
spoke of him with reverential and affectionate awe. 
He overpaid them. And he had never corrected or 
complained of one of them in his life, apparently. 

The housekeeper ruled them for him — and for 
Mrs. Murchison — with a motherly tyranny. She 

[104] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



spoke of them as if she felt nothmg for them but 
tolerant contempt. Did she suspect any of them of 
having killed Murchison? 

"Kill!" she cried. *'I can't get one o' them to 
kill a hen when I need it. I have to get Johnny 
Bowes, the butcher's boy, to come an' do it for me." 

Could Mrs. Murchison's maid have killed him? 

"I'd as soon suspect her," she said, "of breaking 
into the Vatican an' killing her Pope." 

Young Wallace Bruce was out of the reckoning 
because he had gone, that day, to visit some school 
chums at the seaside. There was no one on whom 
the faintest sort of plausible suspicion could be 
fastened — except Mrs. Murchison. She must be 
guilty, unless you were to believe that Murchison 
himself had written the "Pray for me" note in a 
disguised hand, had gone back to bed with his razor 
to cut his own throat, and had then crawled out 
again, for no reason whatever, and staggered across 
the room to lock the bathroom door. 

For a time there was a suspicious discrepancy 
between Mrs. Murchison's testimony as to the 
number of sleeping tablets she had taken and the 
evidence of the box containing what remained of 
the drug. At first she swore that she had taken but 
one tablet. The druggist testified that he had 
given her two dozen tablets on the doctor's pre- 
scription. There were only twenty -one tablets left 
in the box. It was to account for this latter number 
that the prosecution charged her with rising in the 

[1051 



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night and taking the second dose that left her 
stupefied till the doctor revived her. 

Littlejohn solved the puzzle ingeniously. The 
doctor's prescription had not specified the size of 
the dose. He had at first told her, he said, to take 
two tablets. Then he had changed his mind and 
advised her that one would be sufficient. When 
Mrs. Murchison was on the stand, Littlejohn 
brought out that she had been in doubt about how 
many tablets to take. She thought the doctor had 
ordered one, and then she remembered that he had 
prescribed two. As she recalled her hesitation, she 
could not be sure whether she had taken one or 
two. 

*'Is it possible," Littlejohn asked, "that you 
dissolved one in the water, and then, on second 
thoughts, decided that you should take two — and 
added two more, absent-mindedly?" 

**Yes," she admitted, "that is possible." 

And the doctor testified that if she had taken 
three tablets upon going to bed, she must have slept 
from the time the maid left her until he himself re- 
vived her in the morning. 

This became the strongest point in Littlejohn' s 
summmg up. The next strongest was the obvious 
one that she had no motive for killing her husband. 
And, finally, there was no circumstantial evidence 
to connect her with the crime except the single fact 
that Murchison had locked his door against her after 
he had been attacked. 

[106] 



]\niS. MURCHISON 



**The dying man," Littlejohn said, "staggering 
around his room in the dark, may have mistaken 
his direction and locked the wrong door. Or he may 
have supposed that he had been attacked by his 
wife because he saw his assailant flee into her bed- 
chamber. Or, in the extremity of his panic, he may 
have been thoughtless enough to try to save him- 
self by locking the murderer in his wife's room 
while he summoned aid. 

"Who was that murderer? Because all the doors 
and windows of the house were locked, the prosecu- 
tion contends that he or she must have been a 
member of the Murchison household. But he may 
have entered the house earlier in the evening, before 
it was locked up for the night, and concealed him- 
self till the servants were asleep. Escaping through 
Mrs. Murchison's bedroom, he may have returned 
to his hiding place and made off in the morning 
under cover of the excitement in the house, when the 
doors were opened again. Or, in a house so large, 
he may have had some unguarded means of entrance 
and egress which the state has not discovered. 

"It is plain, from the terms of his written con- 
fession, that he — or she — was a religious maniac. 
Neither Mrs. Murchison nor any other member of 
the household can be suspected of religious mania. 
And if she wrote the message in a disguised hand, 
in order to throw suspicion elsewhere, why did 
she not write it in terms that would accomplish her 
end.'* Why did she not sign some name to it.'* Why 
8 [ 107 ] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

did she write a message which has thrown suspicion 
nowhere? 

"The learned counsel for the prosecution argues 
that Mrs. Murchison was the person who would 
chiefly profit by her husband's death. But he has 
failed to show that she had any wish to profit by it. 
He argues that — under the peculiar circumstances 
of her husband's death — she was the person who 
was most easily able to do away with him. But 
he has failed to show that she took advantage of 
her opportunity. The wife of any wealthy man 
is most likely to profit under his will; and she is 
likely to be, by circumstances, most able to kill him 
in his sleep. On such evidence as the prosecution 
has presented against Mrs. Murchison, the wife of 
any murdered man could be suspected of his murder. 
It is not enough. Suspicion, however well founded, 
is not enough. 

"It was for this reason that I allowed my client 
to go on the witness stand in her own defense. It 
seemed to me that her innocence would be so evident 
that no suspicion of her could endure. For this 
reason, too, I made no objection to the many objec- 
tionable questions which the prosecution asked her. 
Throughout the trial I have made no attempt to 
take advantage of those technicalities by means of 
which a lawyer may so often protect a guilty client. 
I allowed Mrs. Murchison to be put through an 
examination so unreasonably merciless that the 
court has rightly characterized it as a 'third degree.' 

[1081 



MRS. MUECHISON 



I had no fear of the result. I knew that Mrs. Mur- 
chison wished not only to prove her own innocence, 
but to give to the state every aid in finding the 
murderer, by answering any question that could 
throw the faintest light whatever on the circum- 
stances of the crime." 

And so on. 

Long before he had finished his argument it was 
evident that the jury was on his side. He spoke as 
if he were one of them, their foreman, in the jury 
room itself, going over the case with them impar- 
tially and trying only to arrive at a just conclusion. 
And they listened to him absorbedly, with reflective 
faces, unconscious of everything but the points that 
he made, whereas they were restless while the 
prosecutor spoke, listened self-consciously, and 
looked at his hands or down at his feet when he 
tried to hold their eyes while he emotionalized them 
with his eloquence. 

5 

Her acquittal was expected, therefore, by every- 
one in the court room. And it was accepted without 
question by everyone outside the prosecution — so 
far as I saw — except Tom McQuade. "She's guilty, 
just the same," he insisted, coldly. 

"I bet you she'd be acquitted,'' Orpen said, "but 
I'd bet you she's innocent, too, if I knew any way 
to decide the bet." 

"I owe you a box of cigars," McQuade conceded. 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

*' That's all right. But if I can ever bring you proof 
that she's guilty you'll return the stakes, will you?" 

"Yes, and doubled." 

**Good." McQuade gathered up his copy paper. 

"Who's to be referee.^" Orpen asked. "Who's 
to decide whether or not your proofs prove 
anything?" 

"I'll leave it to you." 

"No," Orpen said, "that wouldn't be fair." 

"I'll leave it to anyone you name." 

Orpen nodded toward me. "Leave it to him, 
eh?" 

"Perfectly satisfactory," McQuade said. 

Orpen winked at me. "Is there anything else I 
can agree to, Mac, to help you save your face?" 

McQuade took himself off without replying. 

"The trouble with Mac is," Orpen philosophized, 
"he depends too much on facts. I used to do it 
once, myself, but I've learned that in newspaper 
work correct facts aren't as valuable as correct 
impressions." 

There was an old rivalry between these two men 
— the rivalry of antipathetic temperaments. Mc- 
Quade was a keen, hard-bitten worker with a close- 
lipped mouth that looked as if he gnawed it. He was 
always as busy as some instinctively acquisitive 
animal accumulating facts, acquaintances, contacts. 
"The things a newspaper man knows and doesn't 
publish are his best stock in trade," he used to 
say. He was accurate in his reports, making full 

1 110] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



notes in shorthand and transcribing them carefully, 
writing a curt style, in hard little sentences, without 
charm. 

Orpen w^as fat, lazy, meditative. He has made a 
better magazine writer than he ever was a news- 
paper man, but he had one faculty as a reporter that 
was justly envied — he could write excellent copy 
and at the same time listen to what was being said 
and watch what was going on. At the Murchison 
trial, day after day, he started writing in legible 
longhand as soon as the court proceedings began, 
and he continued writing, without making a short- 
hand note, listenmg to the examination of the wit- 
ness on the stand while he was still reporting what a 
previous witness had testified. He used to say: 
"It's just a trick. You sort of split your mind. 
You listen with one ear while you write with the 
other." I have seen him write that way and carry 
on a desultory conversation. He would have his 
day's work on the Murchison trial finished when the 
court" adjourned — all except writing the lead for his 
stuff. McQuade would have to gather up his short- 
hand notes and hurry away to write his story from 
them, in quiet. Orpen twitted him about it. He 
teased McQuade rather cruelly as a constant 
practice. 

"Mac needs it," he said. "He has too much ego 
in his cosmos." 

It was undoubtedly under the spur of Orpen' s 
teasing that McQuade went about so determinedly 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

to get his evidence against Mrs. Murchison. How 
he did it I do not know, but he certainly gave up 
his belated summer holiday to it, and trailed Mrs. 
Murchison's past — through the years of her married 
life with "Aleck" Bruce, the court stenographer, 
back to the early days when she was Mabel Andrews 
on a farm in the Putnam Valley upstate. 

He returned with several disturbing bits of evi- 
dence. The first was that the saying, **God is not 
mocked," had been a favorite one of Mrs. Murchi- 
son's mother. This might be significant, or it might 
not. The second was that as a girl, before she 
married Bruce, Mrs. Murchison had had little edu- 
cation; she had taken a course in shorthand and 
typewriting in order to assist her husband in his 
work, and, in helping him, she had been much about 
the courts. This, McQuade argued, accounted for 
her ability to take care of herself on the witness 
stand. 

"It accounts for it," Orpen pointed out, "if she 
was guilty. If she was innocent, she didn't need to 
*take care' of herself." 

But the final item in McQuade's indictment could 
not be set aside so easily. He had two photographs: 
one of the "God is not mocked" message that had 
figured in the trial, the other of the signature of 
"Mabel Andrews" as it appeared on the application 
for her first marriage license. And Mabel Andrews 
had written her name on that application in an un- 
formed, girlish backhand that was identical with 

[112] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



the handwriting of the message from the murderer 
of her second husband. 

Orpen brought the evidence to me as the referee 
between McQuade and him. "Do you think this 
proves her guilty.^" 

Whether it did or not, it was a whale of a news- 
paper story. That was all I could see in it, at first. 

"Yes," Orpen complained, "but it's McQuade's 
story, not yours or mine. Do you think it proves 
her guilty?" 

"Mac thinks so, I suppose .f*" 

"Sure of it." 

"What do you think.?" I asked. 

"I've a hunch that Littlejohn might throw some 
light on it." 

"We couldn't go to Littlejohn and put him wise 
to this, without Mac's permission." 

"No," he said, "but Mac '11 have to see Littlejohn 
before he prints it, anyway. We might all three go 
together, if that suits you.'' 

It suited me. It even flattered me. They were 
both veteran newspapermen, and I was not much 
more than a cub reporter. I wanted to see them at 
work, interviewing Littlejohn. I wanted to be asso- 
ciated with them in getting the biggest newspaper 
story of the day, as it seemed to me. I kept saying 
to myself : * ' Heavens ! \Miat a story ! " 

Orpen telephoned me, later, that McQuade would 
come; that he had made an appointment with 
Littlejohn to see us at eleven o'clock next morning; 

[113 1 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

that we were to meet McQuade at the door of the 
World Building at 10.45, and go together to Little- 
john's office. 

"Heavens! What a story!" 

6 

**Well, it may look lilce a hell of a good story to 
2/ow," Orpen grumbled, on our way to meet Mc- 
Quade, "but I have a hunch it '11 fizzle before it 
gets to print." 

"Why.?" 

"Because that's the way life is. Things never 
come up to specifications. Mac probably suspected 
there was no meat in his egg or he wouldn't have 
let us see it till he'd hatched it out." 

I suspected that McQuade had been so eager to 
crow over Orpen that he had not been able to wait 
for incubation. And certainly, when we met him, 
there was enough superior silence in his manner to 
justify my suspicion. He nodded briefly and went 
along with us. 

"Who does the talking at this interview.?" 
Orpen asked. 

"You do, if you want to." 

"I'm going to tell him about the bet and show 
him the photos." 

"That's all right with me." 

"Good." 

They did not speak another word outside Little- 

[114] 



MUS. MUBCHISON 



John's office — the old office of Littlejohn, Varley, 
McNeill & Littlejohn, in Chambers Street. The 
reception room was a sort of law library, and the 
separate offices of the partners opened off it. Justin 
Littlejohn was reading a newspaper at a shabby old 
walnut desk when a clerk ushered us in to him. A 
fire of cannel coal was burning in the fireplace of a 
previous generation, and the room was full of the 
peaty smell of the smoke. I judged that Littlejohn 
was using his father's office. Old Martin Littlejohn 
had died about six months before. 

He greeted us absent-mindedly and invited us to 
sit. The character of the room, his air of abstrac- 
tion, his distinguished mask of face — and the gen- 
eral bagginess of his clothes — made me feel as if we 
were interviewing some literary philosopher in his 
workshop. 

Orpen began to explain our coming. He had a 
humorous slow drawl, and he sat in his chair in an 
exaggerated attitude of sprawling ease. Littlejohn 
listened to him benevolently. McQuade also lis- 
tened, watching him as if he were interested in 
Orpen only. But I gathered that Littlejohn was as 
aware of McQuade as McQuade was secretly intent 
on Littlejohn. The very fixity of their attention 
upon Orpen betrayed them to me. 

Littlejohn made no comment except to say, "Yes, 
I remember you all," when Orpen explained that 
we had reported the Murchison trial. Orpen went 
on to tell about the bet that he had made with 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

McQuade, and about the renewal of that wager 
after Mrs. Murchison's acquittal. Littlejohn nod- 
ded. Orpen described rather whimsically Mc- 
Quade's search for new evidence, and in the same 
bantering manner he laid the two photographs be- 
fore Littlejohn. I held my breath for the dramatic 
climax. Littlejohn merely glanced at the photos, 
as if he had seen them before, and said, "Yes.^^" 
inquiringly. 

"Well," Orpen went on, undiscouraged, "before 
I decided that I'd have to give back Mac's cigars 
I wanted to hear what you had to say about that 
handwriting. Do I lose my bet. f^" 

Littlejohn, for answer, turned slowly to Mc- 
Quade. "What made you think she was guilty .f^" 

"The evidence in the case." 

"Oh." He seemed disappointed. He looked down 
at his blotter a moment. "It was you that inter- 
viewed the mother about a month ago, was it?" 

"Yes." 

Littlejohn smiled at Orpen confidentially. "We 
thought it was a state detective. We wondered 
whether they were trying to fasten the crime on 
Mrs. Andrews." 

Orpen chuckled. 

There was a busy and significant silence. 

Littlejohn tilted back in his swivel chair and 
clasped his hands behmd his head. 

"Well, gentlemen," he said, putting aside the 
whole story of the bet as if it were a subterfuge we 

[116] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



had invented, "my client has been acquitted, and 
a person cannot be tried twice for the same crime. 
The case cannot be reopened." 

"We know that," McQuade put in. 

"So if you publish these photographs you will 
merely redirect suspicion against a woman who will 
be unable to clear herself — since nothing that she 
can say will be under oath — and no decision on her 
defense will be judicial." 

"If you can give me any innocent explanation of 
those photographs," McQuade said, "I'll not pub- 
lish them." 

Littlejohn, with his head thrown back, looked 
down his nose at McQuade. Then he unclasped his 
hands, dropped forward in his chair, and challenged 
Orpen with an interrogating eye. 

"It's McQuade's story, not ours," Orpen ex- 
plained. "We can't print it until after he does." 

Littlejohn's expression did not change. 

"Oh!" Orpen said. "If you want our prom- 
ise Yes. I promise." 

I added mine, in reply to a glance from Littlejohn. 

"Well," he said, at last, "I don't know the truth 
about the case, but I can tell you my theory. She 
killed him in her sleep." 

We all sat up together. "In her sleep!" 

"Yes. She probably took one of those tablets 
when she went to bed. The effects of it, I should 
say, wore off in the night, but left her half drugged 
and in what, I believe, is called 'a hypnagogic 

[117] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

state.' In that condition she went to the bathroom 
to take another dose of the stuff, found her hus- 
band's razor on the shelf, wrote that message on the 
dresser, cut his throat, went back to the bathroom, 
took two more tablets, and fell asleep without any 
consciousness whatever of what she had done." 

It was McQuade who broke the staring silence to 
ask, "Why didn't you offer that theory at the trial.^" 

"Because I was doubtful whether a country jury 
would believe it. I considered that Mrs. Murchison 
was morally innocent of her husband's death. She 
was entirely convinced of her own innocence. She 
had no recollection of what she had done in her 
sleep — if she had really done it — and I was afraid 
that if I suggested this sleepwalking theory to her, 
some memory of what had happened might return 
to her, perhaps in the form of something that she 
had dreamed. So I pretended to her that I believed 
Murchison had been killed by a religious maniac 
who had got into the house in some way that was 
not known; and I put her on the stand in her own 
defense and let her win her case in her own way. 
And I think the verdict shows that I was right." 

"How do you account for the handwriting?" 
McQuade pursued him. 

Littlejohn reflected. "I don't know how to ac- 
count for it," he admitted, "except in this way: 
Mrs. Murchison must have begun writing her 
present hand after she married that court stenog- 
rapher. Probably her earlier handwriting was too 

[118] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



illegible for him and he made her leam this pro- 
fessional script. You know she used to help him 
in his work? And in her sleep she must have re- 
turned to her schoolgirl writing." 

"Yes," McQuade conceded. "That would ex- 
plain it." 

"Well, anyway, I win my bet," Orpen said. 
"She was innocent." 

"She killed him," McQuade insisted. 

"That's my theory," Littlejohn explained. "I 
may be wrong. But I'm not wrong about this; 
she's an innocent woman. As her counsel, she could 
not have deceived me. She didn't know she had 
killed him, if she did it. And if you publish those 
photos you'll wreck what is left of a maimed life 
and mark her and her son with a suspicion they will 
never escape from. It's a damnable thing to do. 
And it's a damned dangerous thing for your editor 
to do, since she has the decision of a court declaring 
her innocent, and the law will uphold her." 

McQuade met the implied threat with indif- 
ference. "Had she any motive for killing him — 
anything that would impel her to do it, in her sleep?" 

"I don't know," Littlejohn said. "I didn't dare 
ask her, for fear of starting the suspicion in her mind 
that she had done it." 

McQuade got up. "I think you're right," he 
said. "She killed him, undoubtedly. But either 
she didn't know it or she was the most amazing 
actress that ever went on the witness stand. I 

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accept your theory that she did it in her sleep." 
He turned to Orpen. "You win." He took up his 
hat. "You may have those photos if you want them, 
Mr. Littlejohn. I'll not write the story. No one 
would believe the sleepwalking theory, and I don't 
wish to accuse her of the alternative." 

This decision came as an incredible conclusion to 
me. At first I thought that McQuade was merely 
putting Littlejohn off his guard; that Mac had 
duplicates of the photographs and intended to print 
them if he could find any further evidence to support 
them. I did not understand him then as well as I 
did later. He was unscrupulous about the way he 
acquired information, but he was most scrupulous 
in the way he used it. And he was putting Little- 
john under an obligation — an obligation that would 
probably pay a high rate of interest as time went on. 

Littlejohn shook hands with him. He shook 
hands with us all, saying good-by. But he took 
McQuade's hand with a manner that gave, as well 
as accepted, a promise. And I understood Mac's 
saying, "The things a newspaper man knows and 
doesn't publish are his best stock in trade." 

His wisdom in not publishing the sleepwalking 
theory was vindicated when it leaked into the 
gossip of the editorial offices. It never found its 
way into print, so far as I know. And the Murchi- 
son murder — no matter what theory about it might 
be invented — had soon no more news value than 
last week's stock quotations. 

[120] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



It never occurred to me that Littlejohn had de- 
ceived and outwitted us. And I am sure it never 
occurred to Orpen or McQuade. 



It did not occur to me till more than ten years 
later, when I learned the whole truth about Mrs. 
Murchison from Littlejohn himself. 

I had not seen him at all, in the meanwhile — 
having given up newspaper work — and all I knew 
of him, after the Murchison trial, I gathered from 
the newspapers. I read a special article about him 
in the Sunday World, written, undoubtedly, by 
McQuade. And Orpen had a beautiful blurb about 
him in Success. The editorial comment, after the 
acquittal of Mrs. Deeming, admiringly accused him 
of being "almost a menace to the administration of 
justice," because it had become "practically impos- 
sible to convict anyone whom he defends." But the 
administration of justice got over the difficulty by 
retaining him as special counsel wherever that was 
possible, and the social system was more or less saved. 

I did not doubt his ability, but I am afraid I 
believed that his reputation had been more than 
helped by McQuade and Orpen and the newspaper 
reporters. He seemed to know how to handle them. 
As far as I thought of him at all, I suspected him of 
having the sort of "bubble reputation" that is 
blown up by press puffery. 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

And then I walked into the smoking room of the 
Atlantic liner Rotterdam one wet morning in the 
summer of 1913 — two days out of New York — and 
saw Littlejohn sitting at a card table, smoking an 
old green-cob pipe, and playing Canfield. He had 
aged. He was balder. He looked more of a per- 
sonage than ever. But there was no mistaking him, 
and I must have stared at him, for he nodded when 
he looked up from his cards and caught my eye; 
and he said, "Good morning," affably, and stretched 
out his hand as I approached. 

I was flattered that he remembered me. Before 
the voyage was over I understood that he had not 
remembered me at all. He spoke to anybody who 
looked at him twice. And he would talk to any- 
body — man, woman, or child — who stayed beside 
him long enough to make a conversation possible. 
I never knew a man who stood less upon the formal- 
ity of an introduction. 

He began talking at once about solitaire — ex- 
plaining, with a judicial twinkle, that he liked to 
play it ** because the moral law doesn't run against 
cheating in solitaire." And he went on abusing the 
moral law because of the trouble it gave him. 

"I'm as tired of it as a doctor must get of disease. 
I can cheat myself at solitaire and no one can quote 
the statutes against me." 

I supposed he must be pretty well fed up with 
the statutes — or words to that effect. 

"Hate them," he complained into his pipe. 

[122] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



"Hate prosecuting people. We punish them because 
we don't understand them." 

He played his cards a moment in silence, but with 
a receptive expression of attention lingering in my 
direction. I offered something about not having 
seen him since I had interviewed him in his oflSice 
with Orpen and McQuade. 

"Thanks for telling me," he said. "I knew I'd 
met you somewhere. Haven't seen you about 
lately, have I.^^" 

I explained what had become of me. He dropped 
his game and gave himself up wholly to me and his 
pipe. When the pipe went out he lit a cigar. After 
the cigar he produced cigarettes. And all the time 
he asked questions, made philosophic comments, 
offered his own experiences to parallel mine, and 
appeared as interested as he was interesting. I 
could no more resist him than a bug could resist an 
entomologist — a genial Henri Fabre who knew more 
about my species than I knew myself — for, after 
his first few questions I got the feeling that he had 
some sort of secret diagram of me which he was 
verifying to himself. He was interested in my 
opinions, but only in so far as he could trace them 
back to their temperamental origins. He was much 
less interested in my adult experiences than in my 
childish ones. He led me to talk about my parents — 
by talking about his. Our conversation descended 
to the most astonishing intimacies before we sep- 
arated for luncheon. 

9 [ 123 ] 



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By that time my curiosity was so piqued that he 
could not have avoided me if he had tried. He did 
not try. It appeared that he had some vague plan 
of one day writing a book, and he was eager to 
discuss the practice of letters. I supposed that he 
planned a volume on the law. By no means. He 
was not interested in the law. He wanted to do a 
book on psychology — practical psychology — about 
the origin of character and the derivation of motive. 

In my excitement I almost caught him by the 
collar. As a professing fictionist, a practical theory 
of human character and motive was as breath- 
catching to me as the promise of the long-sought 
philosopher's stone to an alchemist. Did he really 
know anything about that sort of psychology? 

Most emphatically he did. And as he discussed 
it I began to understand his success as a criminal 
lawyer. He had found out a secret of the human 
mind by virtue of which he understood people 
better than they understood themselves. That 
knowledge had made it possible for him to influence 
juries uncannily. It had made it practically im- 
possible for a criminal to deceive or evade him. 
It had made him, as the newspapers said, "almost 
a menace to the administration of justice" until 
justice retained him on its side. And it certainly 
made him the most interesting human being I had 
ever met. 

This is hardly the place to attempt an exposition 
of his theory. One would need to write a book 

[124] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



about it in order to give it worthily. All I wish to 
do, here, is to explain Mrs. Murchison as he ex- 
plained her, inasmuch as her death and the death 
of her son have made it possible to tell the truth 
about her. 

"It was the Murchison case," Littlejohn said, 
"that crystallized the whole thing for me. You 
watched that case? Well, let me tell you what was 
behind it." 

8 

Mabel Andrews Bruce Murchison was the daugh- 
ter of Jonathan Andrews and Euphemia Cory 
Andrews, devout upstate farmers of a Revolutionary 
stock that had gone poor both in blood and in 
substance. Her early life had been narrow, puri- 
tanic, repressed. Her mother was an overworked 
farmer's wife, doing her duty by her God, her 
husband, and her house, implacably. If she ever 
felt any tenderness of affection for her daughter, 
she never let it soften her stern Old Testament 
attitude of disapprobation of young female flesh 
and its frailties as these were incarnated in her 
offspring. Consequently, whatever love the girl 
had, it was for her father. "You could guess that 
from her voice," Littlejohn said. 

"How from her voice.^" I asked. "What do you 
mean.f^" 

"Well, it may not be universal," he replied, "but 
I find that women with those deep contralto voices 

1125] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

have usually imitated them from the father. What 
you love in your childhood, you imitate. That is 
the way character is formed in youth." 

The father, however, was little more demonstra- 
tive than his wife. The girl loved and worshiped 
him, but with a quite religious reverence. "Un- 
doubtedly," Littlejohn said, "he was her first con- 
ception of God. I mean that literally. In the child 
mind, before the intelligence develops, the parent 
is God. I want you to remember that. It is one 
of the keys to Mrs. Murchison." 

Her career as a murderess began when she fell 
in love with a schoolmate, Aleck Bruce, the son of 
the village atheist. The father was a lawyer, a 
drunkard, and generally a "horrible example" to 
the Andrews household. "There was nothing 
against the boy, personally," Littlejohn explained, 
"except that he was the son of his father and 
shared in his father's religious heresies." The girl's 
parents were unaware of her infatuation for him 
until he left home to work as a stenographer in 
New York City and letters from him began to arrive 
at the farmhouse. Then there was a terrific scene. 
The silent girl would not agree to give him up. 
She would not tell her parents how far her love 
affair had gone. She would answer no questions, 
offer no explanations, make no promises. 

"For my purpose," said Littlejohn, "the impor- 
tant thing about that scene was this : her father, in 
an attempt to work on her affection for him, 

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MRS. MURCHISON 



threatened, repeatedly, *If you marry that boy, it 
will kill me.' And when she ran away with Bruce, 
and her father subsequently died — although there 
was no connection whatever between the two events 
— her mother wrote to her: *You have killed your 
father. God is not mocked.' " ^ 

This message, of course, had no effect of remorse 
on the girl. She knew she had not killed her father. 
And she had already escaped from her religious fears 
into the more liberal philosophy of life which her 
husband followed. They were happy together. 
Their child was born. She studied shorthand and 
typewriting to help Bruce in his work, and when he 
developed tuberculosis she sent him to a sanitarium 
in the Catskills, took her child back to her mother 
on the farm, and went to work in New York to 
support both husband and child. 

"The significant thing here," said Littlejohn, 
"is the mother again. As soon as she heard that 
Bruce was consumptive she accepted it as a punish- 
ment which God had visited upon her daughter. 
*God is not mocked.' And when Bruce died, the 
moral was more pointed than ever. 'God is not 
mocked.' And when she realized that her daughter 
no longer believed in such interpositions of Provi- 
dence, she still used the phrase as a warning of 
future calamities that were sure to befall the infidel. 
*God is not mocked.'" 

"Mrs. Bruce was too sensible to pay much atten- 
tion to these predictions. She went about her 

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business as a typist and stenographer, and tried to 
save enough money to take her boy away from his 
grandmother. She knew that his youth would be 
ruined, as her own had been, if she left him on the 
farm. Naturally, out of her small salary she was 
unable to save enough to give him the care and the 
food and the education and the outdoor exercise 
that he needed. He was sickly. So when Murchison 
proposed to her she accepted him. And all her 
problems seemed to be solved." 

Littlejohn turned to me suddenly. "Did you ever 
hypnotize anyone?" 

"No," I said. "Did you.?" 

He nodded. "I've been dabbling in it for years, 
privately, without really knowing what I was 
doing." 

"Did you hypnotize Mrs. Murchison?" 

He did not answer me. "You don't really do it," 
he said. "They do it themselves. You merely 
make the suggestion. You tell them that they're 
sleepy, for instance, and they seem to fall asleep. 
They don't actually sleep. They can hear what you 
say and they can answer you. And they'll do what 
you tell them to — up to a certain point. But if you 
tell them to do something they particularly don't 
want to do, they'll wake up." 

"Well?" 

"Well," he said, "here's what I'm driving at. 
The human mind seems to be in layers. The top 
layer is this intelligent mind that you and I are 

[128] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



talking to each other with. That's the mind that 
goes to sleep. The next layer is the mind that 
dreams when you sleep. That's the layer that you 
reach when you hypnotize a person." 

"And Mrs. Murchison.?" 

"In my second interview with her, before she was 
arrested, I saw that she was on the verge of a nervous 
collapse. She had not slept for some time. She had 
had insomnia before the murder, and it had become 
worse since the murder. That meant two things to 
me. First that she might be easily hypnotized, 
because her intelligent mind would be exhausted for 
lack of rest; and second that there must be some- 
thing seriously wrong in her second layer of mind, 
to prevent her from sleeping. That's the usual cause 
of insomnia, I find." 

"I see. So.?" 

"So I hypnotized her." 

"How.?" 

"Why, I simply got her to make herself com- 
fortable in an easy -chair, and told her to relax and 
rest herself a moment, and assured her that there 
was no need to worry, that I would take care of her 
case, and talked in a soothing voice for a while; 
and when she began to look drowsy I said: 'You're 
feeling sleepy. If you'll just close your eyes and 

rest' And she said: *I can't rest, Doctor. 

I'm afraid I'm going insane.' " 

"'Doctor'?" 

"Yes. She was half asleep already." 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

"Why was she afraid she was going insane?" 

"I found that out later. Some time before, she 
had seen her husband shaving, and she'd had an 
almost ungovernable impulse to jog his elbow so 
as to make him cut his throat.'* 

"Good heavens!" 

"And, of course, the impulse was so inexplicable 
to her that she thought she must be going mad." 

"Of course. And then.?" 

"Why, as soon as she said * Doctor' I went to 
her and put my hand on her forehead, and over her 
eyes so as to close them, and I said: 'No. You're 
quite sane. You have no brain trouble at all. None 
at all. But you're sleepy. Very sleepy.' And I 
began to stroke her forehead. She relaxed so sud- 
denly it was as if I had cut the string that held her 
up. And then she began to tell me." 

"About the murder.'^" 

"Well, I thought she was talking about a dream 
— a dream in which she went to the bathroom to 
get some medicine, and when she lit the bathroom 
light she saw her husband's razor lying, open, on 
the bathroom shelf. The door of his bedroom was 
ajar. She stood in that doorway, with the razor in 
her hand, and pushed the door open till the bath- 
room light just showed his head and shoulders 
where he lay in bed. He was on his back, with his 
face turned away from her, his throat exposed. She 
walked in, wrote something on an envelope, drew 
the razor blade across his throat, returned to the 

1130] 



MRS. MURCHISON 



bathroom, took her medicine, and went back to 
bed." 

"Do you mean she told you this as a dream?" 

''That's what it sounded like." 

"What did you do?" 

"I said: *Go to sleep — deeper. Go deeper.' She 
sank into a heavy, hypnotized stupor, breathing 
stertorously. And I sat down at my desk and had a 
sort of chill." 

"I should think you might!" 

He leaned forward, pointing with a gesture to 
the vague blackness of the ocean heaving slowly in 
the twilight. **I felt as you might feel if that water 
suddenly opened and showed you the depths under 
it." We were sitting in deck chairs, away from 
everybody, talking in low voices. "And, believe 
me," he said, "the human mind's as deep as that — 
every bit — and as unexplored. On the surface, she 
didn't know she had killed Murchison. She hadn't a 
suspicion of it. She was innocent. But just below the 
surface, she knew that she had killed him as if in a 
dream — although she didn't remember that dream." 

"How do you know she didn't?" 

"I'd stake my life on it." 

"Well?" 

"Well, I took her down deeper. I wanted to 
know why she had killed him." 

"Yes?" 

"And there I found that she hadn't killed Mur- 
chison, at all. She had killed her father." 

1131] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

''Rer father?'' 

"Yes. She had killed her father — in the person 
of Murchison — because she wanted to be rid of him 
so as to be alone with Aleck Bruce — in the person 
of his son, Wallace." 

*'I don't understand." 

"She had merely repeated the tragedy of her 
girlhood. Murchison was serving as her father. 
The boy was substituting for her sweetheart. She 
had killed Murchison so as to be free to give all her 
love to the boy, just as she had killed her father to 
go to her lover." 

"But she never killed her father!" 

"Not to the intelligent mind, no. But this had 
gone on, deeper down. And down there, in her 
childish mind, her mother had told her she killed 
her father and she believed it. Moreover, she had 
killed her God. She had abandoned her church and 
all her early religious beliefs. And when she spoke 
from that depth in her mind, you couldn't tell 
whether she was talking of her father, or the God of 
her childhood, or Murchison. They were all the 
one person — just as her son Wallace and his father, 
Aleck Bruce, were one person." 

"Great Scott!" I said. "That's why she 
referred to Murchison as her father, at the trial!" 

"Exactly. And that's why she had the crazy 
impulse to jog Murchison's elbow when he was 
shaving — an impulse so without reasonable motive 
that it made her think she must be going crazy." 

[ 132 J 



MRS. MURCHISON 



"And she didn't know anything of all this?" 

"Not a thing. Miirchison had been behaving 
unpleasantly to the boy, and that had depressed her 
out of all proportion, but she did not know why. 
She didn't know anything of what had happened — 
nor why it had happened." 

"Then do you mean that she went temporarily 
insane and killed Murchison? Or do you mean that 
she did it in her sleep .f^" 

He leaned back and spread his hands. "There 
you are! What is insanity .f' What is sleep? Under 
your upper mind layer of intelligence is this layer 
of an earlier, childish mind — uncivilized, primitive. 
It is this mind that commits crimes, half the time. 
It commits the crimes, in my experience, even when 
the intelligent mind actually carries them out. 
In Mrs. Murchison's case, there was no connection 
between the two minds. But I have seen other 
cases in which the two minds worked together, so 
that the intelligent mind watched the other one 
write the message and cut the throat — without 
being able to interfere. That is why our method of 
prosecuting criminals is as foolish as our ancestors' 
way of punishing the insane." 

"But good heavens!" I protested, "do you mean 
that we're all at the mercy of this sort of thing? — 
that anyone, at any time, may be taken possession 
of " 

He stopped me with a hand on my arm. "Lis- 
ten," he said, slowly, in a low tone, "but don't 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

repeat this. I don't want people to think I'm 
crazy. Underneath all these layers, deeper down, 
there's something else. Before I brought Mrs. 
Murchison out of her trance I tapped it in her — 
something deeper down that seemed to know what 
she had done, and how she had done it, and to know 
that she was innocent, and to want her saved. It 
acted that way. It acted like some one else speaking 
to me through all that confused mass of disjointed 
stuff that came to me." He whispered it finally, 
"A soul." 

And before I could speak he rose and walked 
away, quietly, in the darkness. 

9 

I did not see him again that evening, and we ran 
into rough weather that night, and I did not see 
anyone outside of my stateroom for three days. 
When I was well enough to crawl upstairs to a deck 
chair my interest in psychology was not very robust, 
and Littlejohn was busy with some new acquaint- 
ances. He sat with me one afternoon and discussed 
the secondary mind layer as the sole seat of char- 
acter and the source of all motive, narrating illus- 
trative examples from his experience. I felt as if 
all my mind layers had been softly churned together 
into one faintly sickish instability, and I decided to 
postpone psychology until I got something solid 
under my brain base. I was going to Boulogne-sur- 

[134] 



MRS. MimCHISON 



Mer, with an assignment to work in Paris. He was 
leaving us at some English port of call. We agreed 
to look each other up in New York. 

The war intervened, and I did not see him again 
till I ran into him, crossing Lafayette Park in Wash- 
ington, in December, 1917. He was doing war 
work with the Department of Justice and he looked 
worn out. 

"I've exhausted myself chewing gum," he replied 
to some alarmed comment of mine. "I'm trying to 
cut down my smoking. What are you doing here.'^" 

I told him. 

"Oh, damn the Kaiser!" he said. "You're worse 
off than I am. If there's anyone in the country has 
a kick, he swings it into you people. Come up and 
chew with me some day — gum." 

I promised to. He waved a genial good-by and 
made off through the winter slush. I had forgotten 
to ask him whether he had written his book on 
psychology. I decided to look him up during the 
holiday season, if there was to be any holiday season 
that year in W^ashington; but on December 22d I 
heard that he had broken down from overwork and 
gone to a sanitarium. The last word I had of him 
he was an invalid in the south of France, and no one 
seemed to know anything about his book. 



IV. WARDEN JUPP 

"He has been warden since 1896, and his record 
is one of orderly, efficient, fearless and aggres- 
sively honest service. He is a remarkable man." 
— Lincoln SteflFens, McClure's Magazine. 



IF you were to say that Warden Jupp was the most 
fascinating man you ever knew, you might be 
telling the truth, but you would never be able fo 
prove it. People would expect to hear that he was 
something superlatively brilliant, unusual, pic- 
turesque. And he had none of these qualities. He 
was as commonplace as sunshine, and as miraculous. 
His mystery lay in the inscrutability of the com- 
pletely simple. He was like one of those master- 
pieces of art that seem to have occurred as a perfect 
whole, without the intervention of any artistic 
process. 

I am speaking of his personality, you understand, 
not of his appearance — although his appearance 
was inscrutable enough. He was a small, elderly, 
fat man, bald, rotund, and thoughtfully silent. He 
was shaped somewhat like Mr. Pickwick — in mod- 
ern, ready-made clothes — but more like a duck's 
egg. And you would have said that he held as little 
possibility of surprise and eccentricity in him as a 

[136] 



WARDEN JUPP 



duck's egg. The only superficial characteristic that 
I could find peculiar about him was the fact that 
even in the hottest weather he wore, on top of his 
little round face, a little round derby. He never, it 
seemed, wore a straw hat. 

This was hardly enough to have come a thousand 
miles to discover, although it proved in the end to 
be significant. 

The magazine that had sent me was interested, 
of course, in Warden Jupp's work; but the editor 
believed that his readers were interested more in the 
personalities of the conspicuous than in their 
achievements; I was supposed to do a sort of "soul 
portrait" of Jupp, using his work merely as a back- 
ground — the man in his milieu, but the man more 
than the milieu — and the trouble was that Jupp ap- 
peared to have no more expressiveness outside of 
his work than a mechanical piano has outside of its 
playing. 

I carried Lincoln Steffens's published article on 
Jupp to help me, but after meeting Jupp I judged 
that Steffens had been perhaps as much baflled as 
I was. Certainly he had made no attempt to dissect 
Jupp. He had had a less surgical assignment, how- 
ever. He had come to the little Middle Western 
town while he was investigating the political condi- 
tions of the state (for McClures Magazine) and he 
had been able to **do" Jupp as a reform warden who 

[137] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

had defeated the prison ring of political grafters, 
broken their power to exploit the helpless convicts, 
and made the penitentiary a little model of what a 
salutary purgatory — rather than what a hopeless 
hell — a modern prison might be. Steffens had dis- 
covered Jupp, as he discovered many other social 
exemplars in America. He had told Jupp's story so 
successfully that there was no need for any other 
magazine writer to repeat it. But he had made Jupp 
temporarily so famous that a follow-up story was 
editorially worth while. And the natural sequel 
was a study, an appreciation, an interpretation of 
the man himself. 

I followed over Steffens' s trail without finding 
any illuminating material that he had overlooked. 
Jupp was still performing his daily miracles. Many 
of his convicts were outside the prison walls, with 
heads unshaven and faces tanned, working on the 
prison farms from which Jupp obtained meat and 
dairy products and garden truck for the prison 
kitchens. Gangs of his criminals were making 
roads, at a distance of fifty miles from the peni- 
tentiary, with no prison guards to watch them — 
with only an armed trusty or two patrolling the 
camp at night to see that no unconvicted citizen of 
the neighborhood stole the road tools while the con- 
victs slept. Jupp had built a prison hospital, from 
the plans of a condemned architect, under the super- 
vision of an imprisoned building contractor, with 
the labor of carpenters, stone masons, bricklayers, 

[138] 



WARDEN JUPP 



plumbers, and roofers from the penitentiary cells. 
In the same way he had remodeled and modernized 
the cell houses. He had set up trade schools among 
the prisoners. He had encouraged many of them to 
take correspondence courses in subjects that in- 
terested them. He had turned his penitentiary into 
a sort of academy for social failures who had been 
tried and rejected. He was reclaiming them as 
easily as if they had been boys who had failed in a 
college examination and been sent to jail for their 
failure. And he was doing it without any theory — 
as far as I could see — without any philosophy, 
merely by the exercise of practical common sense. 

Under my persistent questions he formulated, 
reluctantly, some three or four generalizations only. 
"There's no such thing as a criminal class. They're 
just men like you and me." "Out of every hundred 
convicts, there's always maybe five or six that I 
can't do anything with. They ought to be in insane 
asylums." "I don't usually have any trouble with 
a murderer. It's the hobo that's hardest to handle." 
"Anyone could do what I'm doing. There's no 
trick about it. You just have to know how to get 
along with people." 

To the world at large, of course, the inexplicable 
wonder was, why didn't Jupp's unguarded road 
gangs make their get-away? To Jupp the answer 
was simple: "I don't give a man any outside work 
until I'm sure he won't throw us down." How did 
he make sure of that? By studying the man, by 

10 [ 139 ] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

getting reports on him from the guards and trusties, 
by correspondence with his friends and relatives, by 
talking with the man himself. 

I watched and studied Jupp in several such talks, 
without learning much. "Well, boy," he would 
say to a new arrival, "here you are, and you're here 
for five years, less what we can take off for good 
conduct, eh? Well. We're all trying to make 
things as easy for ourselves as we can in this board- 
ing house. We don't want you here any longer than 
we can help, and we don't want you to come back 
when you leave. We'll always have boarders enough 
without you. We don't care what you're here for. 
The question with us is, how 're we going to get 
along with you now that they've shoved you in on 
us? And the answer to that is — it's up to you. See? " 

He sat at his desk, with his hat on the desk 
blotter before him, rather indifferent, slightly 
bored, completely matter-of-fact. His manner said : 
"Here's my proposition. Take it or leave it, I 
don't care." 

He neither looked attentively at the convict nor 
avoided looking at him. He showed no sympathy, 
no hostility, no superiority, no desire to ingratiate 
or persuade — no feeling and no purpose at all that I 
could see, except the one that he expressed — to make 
a difficult situation as easy as possible for all con- 
cerned. But I noticed that when the convict had 
once looked up at Jupp, his eyes did not leave the 
warden's face again until the interview was over and 

[140 1 



WARDEN JUPP 



Jupp said mildly to the guard on his ojQfice door: 
"All right. Who's next out there?" 

The next might be a convict begging for the free- 
dom of "outside work." To one such I heard Jupp 
say: "I don't know, Jim. I'll see. I'll talk to the 
boys. I'll let you know by Friday." And by "the 
boys" he meant the other convicts. 

To another he answered, flatly: "No. I can't do it 
yet. I can't trust you out there, and you know it." 

The prisoner repeated his appeals. 

Jupp shook his head. "If I hadn't anyone to 
consider but myself, I might take a chance on you, 
but I've got to think of the rest of the boys. If I 
send out a man that breaks and runs, they'll all 
blame me. They'll say: *He ought 've known 
better than to put a yellow dog out here with us. 
If he's going to play the sucker, he'll have us all in 
Dutch.' And that's the truth. I can't take chances. 
I've got to be sure." 

The man begged and promised piteously. 

"Nope," Jupp said. "Can't do it. Go back to 
your work and wait. Get any of the boys you can to 
come to me with a good word for you. If you have 
any friends anywhere, tell them to write me. WTio's 
next out there?" 

3 

I found out, later, that Jupp craftily filed all 
these letters of indorsement and recommendation 
from the prisoner's friends and relatives in the out- 

[141] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

side world, and card-indexed the addresses, and 
used the information to trace and recapture the 
convict if he escaped. I noticed, too, some uncon- 
scious duplicity in his use of slang and slurred speech 
in his talks with the prisoners. But his basic sin- 
cerity, nevertheless, was obvious. He did really 
consult with "the other boys" before he **took a 
chance" on any prisoner. If a man on outside work 
showed any signs of yielding to the temptation to 
run away, his gangmates attended to him. If they 
could not stiffen him up, they reported him to 
Jupp and had him returned to his cell. It was 
not merely their loyalty to Jupp that held them; 
it was also their loyalty to one another, to their 
own interests, and to their gang spirit which Jupp 
worked on. 

The thing seemed so simple and natural that I 
had continually to remind myself: "All over this 
country the prison system has broken down, and 
no one cares. It's the greatest failure of our 
American civilization. The prisons are run for 
political patronage and for contractors' profits. 
The prisoners are treated barbarously. They come 
out more criminal than they went in. ' Moreover, 
the whole criminal law is founded on the archaic 
idea of revenge. Men are sent to jail to be punished 
as criminals, not to be reclaimed from criminality. 
Anyone who tries to institute any sort of prison 
reform is accused of making criminals so comfort- 
able in jail that they will lose their fear of imprison- 

[ 142] 



WARDEN JUPP 



ment. All the newspapers of this state are printing 
that charge against Jupp at this very minute. 
And here he is — without any public opinion to sup- 
port him, without any example to encourage him — 
holding off the whole political plunderbund of his 
state while he makes his prison a hospital for the 
moral failures of society instead of a pest hole in 
which every kind of moral disease is spread and 
made chronic. How does he do it? Why does he do 
it? What is there in him that makes him want to 
do it and able to do it? He is the one man of his 
kind in a million. Why is he, miraculously, that 
one man?" 

Of course, he himself could not tell me. People 
never can. The best you can do is to encourage 
them to "reminisce." What they recall is some- 
times unimportant enough, but the fact that they 
recall it is frequently significant, and the emo- 
tion with which they recall it is often a key to 
character. 

I tried to start Jupp back into his past. Had he 
been long in politics? 

No, he had never held a political office before; 
he had been at the head of the Middle Western 
agency of a New York life-insurance company when 
the Governor of the state offered him the wardenship 
of the state penitentiary. The Governor had offered 
it to him because he had been helping released con- 
victs to find jobs and get back on their feet. He had 
been doing that for years, **off and on," as he said. 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

How had he begun? 

"I don't know," he answered. **Just drifted 
into it." 

He stuck there. 

I had heard — though not from him — that he had 
saved the Governor's youngest son from criminal 
associates some years before, and that the Gov- 
ernor had been his stanch friend ever since. When I 
asked him about it, he merely shook his head. 

I tried another tack. "It's your theory, isn't it," 
I suggested, "that a prison ought to be a reforma- 
tory instead of a penitentiary — that the best way 
to protect society from criminals is to convert the 
criminals." 

He rubbed the back of his bald head, worried. 
"Well, I don't know," he evaded me. "I'm just 
trying to do the best I can. We have fewer escapes 
this way than they had under the old system — and 
fewer 'repeats.' Besides, there's less trouble with 
the boys. It costs less to hold them than it used to. 
They work better, too. And by cutting down the 
graft the penitentiary's a lot less expensive to the 
taxpayer. We're really making almost an even 
break on the business as it stands if you figure what 
it'd cost the state to build the roads we've built, 
and what we save by raising our own food, and 
what the hospital would have stood us, and what 
we earn out of the quarry. Of course, the con- 
tractors are sore. And the unions won't let us 
turn out things for sale, or we could earn a profit. 

[144] 



WARDEN JUPP 



We're putting together our accounts now for our 
annual report. I wish you'd go over it with me if 
you have time. And if you've any suggestions to 
make " 

It was evident that I could never get anything 
from him by asking him questions. We talked 
about his annual report. He agreed that he ought 
to make it an oflScial statement of some value as 
news, so that the papers might be tempted to print 
it. What he needed was publicity. If he could 
give the citizens of his state a fair view of what he 
was really doing in the penitentiary, they would 
surely support him against the political profiteers. 
W^e began to choose the items that looked as if they 
might hit the public in the eye — to arrange the 
report so as to star these items conspicuously — 
to gather them together in a brief but arresting 
introduction which the newspaper men would be 
able to quote. We ended by deciding that I ought 
to rewrite the whole report in a manner less dull 
than the official pomposity in which it was being 
droned out. As this was a work of composition 
that would probably take some days and require 
frequent consultations with Jupp, and since the 
penitentiary was three miles from the village and 
its Grand Hotel, I accepted his invitation to live in 
the warden's official residence while I was collabo- 
rating with him. 

It was a little white-brick house in an orchard 
outside the prison walls. And when I arrived the 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 



door was opened to me by a manservant who proved 
to be the beginning of my first clue to the truth 
about Jupp. 

4 

His name was Palin. 

Palin was a lean Irishman, gray and shiftily 
subservient. He sniffed at me inimically until he 
saw my bag and guessed who I was. After that he 
was rather pathetic in his eagerness to please me. 
I supposed that he was some old political pensioner, 
in a linen coat, acting as domestic doorkeeper to 
the warden and anxious to stand well with the 
warden's friends. 

When we were smoking, after dinner, I learned 
that all the servants in the house were convicts. 
This Palin, the butler, had been a yeggman, a sort 
of tramp burglar. The cook was a negro preacher 
who had stolen the funds of his church. The house- 
man, who swept the floors and made the beds and 
helped in the kitchen, had been guilty of larceny as 
an express messenger. The coachman had shot his 
employer in a rage — when the man refused to pay 
him the wages he had earned — and he was serving 
a life sentence. 

"No," Jupp said, "we don't have any servant 
troubles. Do we, gi- . * 

His wife smiled sL yly. She was much younger 
than he, and she h ^ ^een almost as silent through 
dinner as a bashful ' ild. He had married her out 

[ 146 1 



WARDEN JUPP 



of the restaurant of a railroad station in Detroit 
when she was a waitress and he was traveling for 
the Great Lakes Fish Company, before he took to 
life insurance. They had no children. 

"No servant troubles at all," he said. "They're 
all prisoners — except Pitz." 

Pitz proved to be the second clue, some days later. 
At the moment I learned only that Pitz did the 
gardening and tended the chickens. 

"He'll stay here as long as Palin does," Jupp 
said. "They're a couple of old cronies. And if 
Palin comes back for another term, Pitz '11 come 
along, too." 

This had a sound of Damon and Pythias in the 
underworld. I had been thinking that if I could not 
get an article out of Jupp, I might use my oppor- 
tunity to gather the raw material of some prison 
short stories. 

"Did you notice the old fellow that cuts our 
grass?" Jupp asked. 

I had not. Jupp told me about him. 

I was admitting to myself that there was no 
promise of any insight into Jupp to come from his 
wife. She was more like a daughter to him. Her 
attitude of mind was obviously one of dumb, adoring 
acceptance, without any critical understanding of 
who he was or what he was trying to do in the world. 
He managed the house as he managed the prison. 
She lived there as she might have lived in the Grand 
Hotel, reading, playing a little on the piano, doing 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AJVIERICANS 

fancy work. She had been living so ever since their 
marriage, chiefly in hotels, of course. She had a 
sort of faded, sickly prettiness, very touching. 

When I went to bed I thought more about Pitz 
and Palin than about Jupp and his wife. 



I was busy, most of next day, in Jupp's "den," 
off the dining room. It has nothing to do with the 
story, but I should like to describe that den — as a 
proof of how difficult it was to predicate anything 
about Jupp from his surroundings. 

Its walls were covered with a crimson paper 
against which its carpet screamed in another tone 
of red and a loud design of pink roses. On a puffy 
plush sofa, in one corner, reposed a single fatuous- 
looking sofa cushion decorated with a colored 
portrait of a Gibson girl; and obviously no head 
but hers had ever reposed there. Jupp's box of 
stogies waited for him on a little round table with 
the crossed bamboo legs of a tripod, its top tacked 
about with ball fringe. There were two of those 
"American rockers" that oscillate curtly on sta- 
tionary platforms. An empty office desk stood 
beside the countrified lace curtains of a window that 
looked out on apple trees and a chicken run. Every- 
thing was new, clean, very plushy, much befringed 
and fancy-worked, and brazenly self-righteous with 
the air having been bought from a Chicago mail- 

[1481 



WARDEN JUPP 



order catalogue. In this room, of an evening, after 
his wife had gone to bed, Jupp was accustomed to 
sit in a rocker, the newspaper on the floor beside 
him, smoking a rat-tail stogie and meditating on 
those measures of prison reform which were so 
miraculous in his day and generation. 

Palin gave me this picture of Jupp meditating. 
He gave me everything else that he knew of Jupp, 
in a quick, shallow stream of eager information, as 
soon as he understood that I was "writing up" the 
warden for a New York magazine. But in spite of 
all his praise and confessed admiration of Jupp, he 
failed to conceal a feeling of his own superiority — 
the superiority which a tramp feels for a housed and 
restricted citizen, the superiority of the completely 
unmoral maverick for the conventional soul who 
is restrained by the accepted fences. I listened to 
what he had to say, though I had, of course, no 
intention of using it. I would not print anything 
about Jupp without first letting him read it. And 
Palin told me chiefly things that Jupp would not 
care to see in print. 

Jupp and he had been boys together on the 
streets of Brooklyn. (I made no notes at the time, 
so I cannot give dates and addresses.) Jupp's 
father, he said, had been an English sailorman who 
"went off on a ship, one day, an' f ergot the way 
home, I guess." His mother was some sort of 
foreigner — "a Swede, mebbe. Anyway, she was a 
hell-cat." She used to beat the boy over the head 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

with a stick. **I mind he come to school onct with 
bruises on his skull the size of a baseball." 

Why had she beaten him? 

**He'd snuk off with the gang after school, 'stead 
o' makin' a bee line fer home. She didn't want 
him runnin' with us." 

\Miy not? 

"We wasn't teachin' him his Sunday-school 
lessons, I guess." 

f She was a Lutheran, apparently. "We was 
mostly Dogans," Palin explained. 

Jupp became the butt of the other boys. "He 
c'u'dn't fight fer a cent. When you hit 'm he'd shut 
his eyes. His name was funny — Jimmy Jupp." 
They had a rhyme they used to call after him on 
the streets: 

"Jimmy Jupp, 
The sailor's pup, 
Lost his *fadder' 
An' got d up." 

"He ust to say *f adder,' like a Swede, when he 
was a kid. 

"She made him work Saturdays fer a baker, 
deliverin', till he got fired 'cause we'd trip him up 
an' spill his buns, an' run with what we c'u'd grab. 
After that he worked fer a kike that had a dry- 
goods store. Cash boy er somethin'. She ust to 
go round an' collec' his wages, fer fear we'd snatch 
'em from 'm on the way home." 

Palin must have been flattered by my interest; 

[150] 



WARDEN JUPP 



he talked for an hour, standing. And he was more 
than interesting; he was lambently illuminating. 
He made it plain that Jupp, a meekly honest and 
inoffensive boy, had been forced to feel himself a 
sort of illegitimate and ridiculous outcast. We 
know now that such a lesson, learned in childhood, 
persists for a lifetime as a hidden influence in that 
dark background of character which we call the 
subconscious mind. Consequently, Jupp's habit- 
ual silence would be the silence of timidity. He 
could not talk about himself, because — no matter 
what his achievement, his success, his reward in 
praise and public notice — his conviction of shameful 
inferiority would remain untouched and still uncon- 
sciously determinative. Out of his own young 
suffering he had learned to identify himself with 
misery, so that he would automatically sympathize 
with guilt and ostracism; but he would not under- 
stand the source of his sympathy, and he would be 
unable to express that sympathy except in his 
unconscious actions, because he would unknowingly 
expect ridicule and misunderstanding from anyone 
who approached him. So, instead of admitting 
that he was trying to protect and reclaim his per- 
secuted convicts he would maintain that he was 
acting in the interests of the taxpayer and trying 
merely to put his prison on "a paying basis." In 
his talks with the convicts — though he would uncon- 
sciously identify himself with them by his manner 
of speech — he would be guardedly matter-of-fact 

1151] 



I 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

and businesslike. They would see through him; 
they would "get" him at once, as if intuitively. 
I would not. I would need a cur like poor Palin to 
explain him to me. 

"Palin," I asked, **how did he ever become 
interested in this business of helping cons?" 

"Search me," Palin grinned. "It's a good graft, 
just the same. Jupp's all right, but he's no fool. 
Take it from me." 

"No," I said, "I can see he's no fool, but I'm not 
so sure about you. How did you happen to come 
together out here?" 

Palin held his green-toothed grin, unabashed, 
"I'm no fool, neither, but I'm unlucky. They caught 
me with the goods an' slapped me in here fer ten 
years. I was doin' time inside when Jupp got his 
job here." 

"And this friend of yours, Pitz?" 

"Oh, we sent fer Pitz. He's an' ol' side partner 
o' mine. We ust to run together." 

"What was his line? Safe cracking, too?" 

"Naw." Palin was superior again. "He's just 
a mut. He don't know how to make a livin' at 
nuthin'. We teached him chicken raisin' since he 
come here. He's just a hot-air artist." 

"You mean a con man?" 

"Naw. Con nuthin'! He c'u'dn't con a white 
hen. He thinks he's an arnachist. I ust to keep 'm 
when we was out together." 

"And he went to jail with you?" 

[152] 



WARDEN JUPP 



"He did not. He went onct, back in York State, 
but that was Jupp's fault. It was Jupp got us 
pinched, fallin' down on us. That's why he's been 
kind o' — you know — lookin' after us out here." 
He winked despicably. "I guess he feels like he 
helped put us on the blink. You know, onct you've 
been in stir, you're marked. You know. The cops 
lay fer you." 

"How did Jupp fall down on you.^ Tell me about 
it." 

6 

He told me — after he had made me promise not to 
speak of it to Jupp. And the way he told it, it 
sounded like the adventure of three furtively defiant 
rats. I tried to get Pitz's version of it, later, but 
Pitz would not talk. He was a malevolent-looking 
foreigner with thin black hair, a limp black mus- 
tache, and a face pitted with black spots as if it had 
been blown full of bird shot. He was gentle with 
his chickens, and they associated with him, clucking 
amiably — which I took to be proof of a superior 
spiritual clairvoyance in hens. I never saw Palin 
and him together; they must have fraternized only 
in the evenings, after their work was done. 

My promise to Palin did not prohibit me from 
trying to get Jupp's account of the incidents that 
had brought him and Palin and Pitz together for 
the first time. And his version of the adventure 
came out naturally in conversation about the other 

[153] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

two. His story was, for me, the final explanation 
of everything in him that had puzzled me. Not 
obviously so, you understand. As he told it, it 
sounded like a nightmare. It was as disjointed as a 
nightmare. For a time, his motivation throughout 
was as unreal to me as the motivation of any be- 
havior in a fantastic dream. And like a dream, it 
had to be interpreted. 

For instance, neither Palin nor he explained how 
Jupp had allowed himself to be involved in the 
incidents, to begin with. Jupp was then working 
for a grocer on lower Ninth Avenue in New York 
City. He was out walking the deserted streets of 
the water front after midnight. He ran into Palin 
accidentally, on his way home; and after a few 
minutes' talk he turned back to accompany Palin 
to a "water-front joint," at Palin's invitation. 

Observe that Palin's psychology is clear enough. 
He had been padding around with Pitz, in search of 
a dishonest penny. They saw a man — who proved 
to be Jupp — coming up the empty avenue, on the 
opposite side of the street, alone; and Palin crossed 
to meet him, with the intention of either begging 
from him, if he was sober, or picking his pockets, if 
he was drunk. Pitz remained on the other side of 
the road, to watch. Their predestined victim was 
walking blindly, his head down, his overcoat collar 
up to his ears, his hands deep in his pockets. Palin 
bumped into him, under a street light, as if acci- 
dentally, and knew he was sober by the sturdy way 

[154] 



WARDEN JUPP 



in which he took the impact. He stopped and 
turned a bewildered face to Palin, and Palin 
recognized him. 

"Don't know me, Jimmy, uh?" he said. 

Jiipp did not know him — had not seen him for 
years. Moreover, Palin, in thin clothing, was 
huddled together against the cold, his hands in 
trousers pockets so low on his hips that he seemed 
to be stooping down to reach them, in a senile 
crouch. 

"I thought he was some little old man," Jupp 
described it, "without any hair." Palin was just 
out of jail and his hair had not yet grown. 

To Palin's eye, Jupp acted as if he were walking 
in his sleep. "When he saw who it was," Palin 
told me, "he looked round like he didn't laiow where 
he was, an' he says, * Where did you come from?' 
I tol' him I was out takin' a little exercise, an' I ast 
him where he was headin' fer. He kind o' didn't 
hear me. Put his ear down to me like he was deaf 
an' made me say it over again. I thought he was sort 
o' doped er somethin'. I ast him if he was workin', 
an' he said, *Yes. Over at Sutler's.' I seen he was 
sore at Sutler by the way he talked. An' then, after 
a little, I ast him to come down with me to a joint 
an' have a drink. An' he come along." 

Palin's psychology, as I say, is clear enough. 

But why was Jupp so worried that he was walking 

the streets at midnight, like a man in a daze? And 

why did he accept the invitation of an evident 

11 [ 155 ] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

criminal to drink beer in a water-front thieves' 
resort? 

Palin admitted to me that he gave this invitation 
because he saw that Jupp was angry at his employer, 
the grocer; and Palin conceived the idea of tempting 
Jupp to *'get back" at the grocer by means of some 
thieves' trick in which Pitz and he might share the 
profits. The conversation between Palin and Jupp, 
under the street light, putting it together from both 
their versions, ran somewhat like this: 

When Jupp said that he was working for Sutler, 
Palin sneered, "Gettin' rich, uh?" 

"Rich!" Jupp snorted. "Did anyone ever get 
rich working for him?" 

"No," said Palin. "Ner fer anybody else. They 
get rich, but you don't." 

Jupp suddenly plucked his hand from his pocket. 

"That's right, by !" he cried, with a vehement 

gesture that showed he had been touched on his 
bruise. 

Palin followed up his cue. "You've found it out, 
have you? Fow're swift, i/o ware! I got wise to that 
five years ago." 

"And what's more," Jupp went on, "they don't 
pay you what you earn. He thinks because I'm on 
the square he can dock me anything he likes and 
I won't try to get back at him. It'd serve the old 
skin right if I " 

"Sure, it would," Palin cut in, eagerly. "You'd 
be dead right. A man's either got to work fer what 

[156] 



WARDEN JUPP 



he gets er take it from some one that does. An' 
these muts don't work fer it — do they? — these 
sharks that own stores?" He jerked his head side- 
ways at the shop fronts. "They don't work fer it, 
so they soak it out o' the kiyis that do. It makes me 
laugh ev'ry time I see this town. A lot o' guys 
slavin' to keep a lot of other guys from havin' to do 
any thin'. An' a lot o' cops with big sticks watchin' 
to see that the guys that work don't take any thin' 
but what the other guys — that donH work — want to 
give 'em." He hitched up his trousers by the 
waistband and cursed. ^ 'It's a bug-house game, as 
Pitz says." 

Jupp opened his mouth, and shut it again with an 
effort. His mind was busy somewhere in the silence, 
at a distance from his tongue. It was his tongue 
alone that asked, at last, unexpectedly, " Where' ve 
you been?" 

"I jus' got out o' Bellevue th' other day," Palin 
lied. *'A fresh mut ga' me a tap on the koko an' 
cracked it. That's where they sheared me." He 
ran his hand up the back of his head. 

Jupp nodded, but without any aspect of com- 
prehension. 

**I been hangin' out with a gang o' fuUahs along 
down here," Palin said. "We got a sort o' joint 
where we get together. Come along down an' have 
a bowl o' suds." 

"How far is it?" 

"Oh, jus' the docks." 

[157] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Jupp looked at the empty distance blankly. In 
a moment he said, "I'll go down a couple o' blocks, 
anyway." 

7 

This is all very well, but why was Jupp on the 
streets at midnight? I asked him that question, and 
he said he had had insomnia. What had given him 
insomnia .^^ Well, worrying about Sutler. There 
were two clerks in Sutler's shop; some groceries had 
been stolen, and Sutler had taken half the value of 
the missing goods out of Jupp's wages, although 
there was no proof that either of the clerks was the 
thief. This, according to Jupp, had infuriated him. 
The other clerk was a mere girl, a niece of Sutler's 
wife, and Jupp was sure that Sutler had only pre- 
tended to dock her. He believed that Sutler had 
exaggerated the value of the stolen groceries and 
taken all their actual value out of his pay. 

Would that seem a convincing reason to you for 
Jupp's behavior.^ Would it, if you were trying to 
do a "soul portrait" of Jupp.^ Here was a timid 
boy, used to injustice, brutally trained in honesty, 
and beaten as a child for associating with this very 
Palin whom he was now accompanying to a dis- 
reputable resort. Would Sutler's injustice have 
driven him to fraternize with such a jailbird as 
Palin? Would mere injustice have put him out on 
the streets, like a man walking in his sleep, and 
ready to burst out with a threat to "get back" at 

[158] 



WARDEN JUPP 



Sutler by — by what? Obviously, by stealing from 
him! 

No. It came to me more and more strongly the 
more I thought of it. Jupp's insomnia had been 
the insomnia of guilt. He had already "got back" 
at Sutler. Suspected of stealing, and unjustly fined 
for stealing, he had revenged himself by taking out 
of Sutler's till, dollar by dollar, the amount that 
Sutler had fined him. That amount was twenty 
dollars, as I discovered from a significant dis- 
crepancy between Jupp's story and the account that 
Palin gave me. And I am convinced that this 
twenty dollars, in one-dollar bills, was clasped in 
Jupp's hand, in his overcoat pocket, when Palin 
bumped into him under the street light. 

Now, if I know anything about a man like Jupp, 
as long as he was stealing he would allow himself to 
feel no sense of guilt. None whatever. Contrary 
to all the moralists, he would be conscious only of 
the emotions of a timid soul in revolt, who throws 
off an oppression and is vindicated to himself as a 
man of spirit by that act. He would feel no shame 
before Sutler; he would feel only a defiant contempt 
for the man who had tried to take advantage of him 
and had overreached himself. The little roll of bills 
in an inner pocket would be a constant reminder 
of exultation; he would count them over every 
night with a sort of fierce joy; and he would waken 
to the thought of them every morning, resolutely. 

But as soon as the appointed sum had been com- 

[159] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

pleted, and the money transferred to an outer 
pocket, the glow of this excitement would begin to 
fade. A dozen times a day he would find it neces- 
sary to prove to himself that he had not done 
anything dishonest; and though he convinced him- 
self each time, he would find, to his bewilderment, 
that he did not remain convinced. He would feel 
the need of getting the support of some other 
person's assurance of his innocence — and then he 
would see that everyone but himself would consider 
him guilty beyond argument. The law, if it found 
him out, would shut him up in a prison among 
thieves. If he told his mother, she would make him 
return the money and declare himself ashamed and 
sorry for what he had done. And he was not 
ashamed! And he was not sorry! If the law did 
not prevent Sutler from taking twenty dollars from 
him, what right had it to prevent him from taking 
the money from Sutler? It was all a conspiracy to 
protect Sutler, while Sutler took advantage of his 
power to steal from him. Everyone who considered 
him a thief was either the dupe or the partner of this 
game against him. 

And wandering about the streets, fighting out 
this endless inner argument with himself, he had 
run into Palin; and Palin had at once said, in effect: 
"Sure! You're dead right. They're all in a game 
against you. I understand. I been through it." 
And Jupp, fascinated, supported against the ac- 
cusation of guilt that was hounding him, would be 

[160] 



WARDEN JUPP 



unable to turn away from Palin. And when Palin 
invited him to come to some "joint" that Jupp 
knew would be disreputable, he would hesitate, and 
look at the vacant nightmare streets through which 
he had been wandering alone; and he would say, 
"Well, I'll go down a couple o' blocks, anyway." 

That is my theory, at least, of what happened. 
And it has the merit not only of accounting for the 
beginning of the adventure; it explains Jupp's 
conduct through the exciting incidents that fol- 
lowed; and it makes understandable the emotion in 
which he ended and the extraordinary spiritual 
effect of the whole affair on him in after life. 

8 

In any case, they went down toward the water 
front together, Jupp mute and absent-minded, and 
Palin talking as if he were afraid that silence might 
break the charm of his influence over Jupp. He 
was depending on Pitz and alcohol to complete the 
criminal seduction of the grocer's clerk, and Pitz 
was following them, on the other side of the street; 
but Palin, having said nothing about his con- 
federate, could not now call him in without danger 
of arousing suspicion. He planned to wait until he 
had Jupp at a saloon table before he gave Pitz the 
sign to join them. 

They were nearing the water front when some- 
thing confusing happened. 

[161] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

A fat man came weaving drimkenly toward them, 
his coat and overcoat unbuttoned, his thumbs in 
the armholes of his waistcoat, sucking in and puff- 
ing out cold air through the stem of a pipe from 
which he had lost the bowl. Jupp did not notice 
him, but Palin edged off and passed him between 
Jupp and himself; and at the instant of passing, 
unknown to Jupp, he shouldered the staggerer from 
his balance and threw him against Jupp. Jupp 
caught him to save him from falling. Palin helped. 
The man struggled, was rolled around between 
the two, lost his hat and his pipe stem, and had his 
coat twisted about him amazingly in his efforts to 
extricate himself from their attempts to keep him 
steady. When they finally got him put to rights 
they left him cursing them, and went on. 

Palin began to talk again, feverishly. "You want 
to hear this f ullah Pitz. I ain't no arnachist, neither, 
but I got a right to live without bein' worked to 
death by a lot o' bloated muts that 're too fat to 
work fer themselves. Pitz " He glanced be- 
hind him. He dropped his voice. "Go on down 
this street, Jim, to the water front an' turn south. 
I'll meet you a couple o' streets down. I want to 
see a f ullah " 

He nodded, turned the corner, and made off be- 
fore Jupp could speak. 

[ Jupp came out of his trance to find himself 
deserted. He went automatically almost as far as 
the next corner; then, his original hesitation reas- 

1 162 1 



WARDEN JUPP 



serting itself, he decided to turn north and go home, 
instead of turning south to rejoin Palin. With that 
decision, he thrust his hands deeper into his over- 
coat pockets and found what proved to be, when 
he drew it out, a silver watch ! He put his hand into 
his pocket again and took out — a wallet ! He looked 
at them stupidly. He looked around him, stupidly, 
for Palin. He saw at a distance behind him the 
drunken man whom Palin and he had bumped into; 
and this man, under a street light, had taken off his 
overcoat and was searching it for something that he 
had lost, obviously. And the significance of this 
sight reached Jupp's bewildered apprehension at the 
same moment that he saw a stranger on the opposite 
side of the street, watching him. 

The stranger, of course, was Pitz. Palin, having 
"rolled the rummy" deftly, had slipped the watch 
and the wallet into Jupp's pocket and fled when he 
saw that the drunken man had missed them. And 
he had left Pitz to watch the innocent repository 
of the loot. 

Now I do not wish to split any psychological 
hairs, but if Jupp had not been already feeling 
guilty, would he not have taken the stolen things to 
the nearest policemen and cleared himself.^ — even 
if he had to deny that he knew who Palin was, in 
in order to protect him. Well, the thought does not 
seem to have occurred to Jupp at all. He tried to 
get away into a side street where he might drop the 
things into a gutter unobserved. And, of course, he 

[163] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

was followed by Pitz. Jupp quickened his pace 
when their drunken victim raised a drunken shout 
behind him; and when Pitz quickened, too, Jupp 
supposed that Pitz was a plain-clothes man who 
was shadowing him. He had turned north, toward 
home. A policeman began to sound the alarm with 
his nightstick; and this ringing tattoo, answered by 
another policeman ahead of him somewhere, stopped 
him, weak in the knees. With an effort to simulate 
innocence, he turned to look back at the pursuit, 
and when Pitz overtook him he asked, faintly, 
"What's the matter back there?" 

Pitz glared at him with a baleful contempt. 
*' Where d'you think you're goin'.?" 

"Home," Jupp gasped. 

"You go down where you were tol' to go," Pitz 
said. "Goon!" 

Jupp went, down the side street toward the water 
front again, and Pitz crossed the road and followed 
on the opposite side. Jupp, of course, took it for 
granted that he was now practically under arrest. 
He supposed that the detective had guessed that 
he had a rendezvous with Palin and intended to 
gather them both in together. 



I asked, "Why didn't you tell him the truth?" 
He shook his head. "I didn't think of it." 
"What (fi(Z you think of?" 

[164] 



WARDEN JUPP 



He was sitting with one leg tucked under him, 
a stogie in the puckered center of his lips, swaying 
thoughtfully in his American rocker, like one of 
those Chinese figurines that nod the head. 

He replied, queerly, "I was thinking that when 
I was a kid and used to go to work in a drygoods 
store, my mother used to give me a bottle of tea to 
take in my lunch box, and I used to put the bottle 
between the blankets on a shelf at the back of the 
store, to keep it warm, like it was a boy in bed." 

I could make nothing of it. He said it with a 
funny sort of wistfulness, his eyes fixed on nothing. 
I was puzzled. 

"What made you think of that.^" 

"I don't know. Maybe I was thirsty." He 
smiled apologetically. 

I pretended that I was curious to identify the 
exact spot on the water front where this had hap- 
pened. He could not remember. He recalled that 
he had seen a squad of street cleaners, in white, 
brushing out the dust from the crevices between 
the cobblestones, and that the wind sent this dust 
smoking down the empty thoroughfare from their 
brooms. He recalled, too, that in the silence of the 
night the throbbing of steam from the ocean liners, 
hidden behind the "housework" of the piers, set 
the air beating like a pulse. Both of these are recol- 
lections of irrelevant things unforgetably perceived, 
under a great strain of emotion, by a divided mind 
that is trying to interest itself in externals in order 

[165] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

to escape the unendurable strain of its thoughts. 
What thought was Jupp trying to suppress? The 
thought of his guilt, I should say, undoubtedly, and 
of the accidental justice of his punishment. 

When Pitz and he came to the water front, Pitz 
had to follow directly behind him, because there is 
no sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, only 
wharf sheds. They had walked down almost to the 
next street corner when Jupp heard a low hiss beside 
him, and Palin caught him by the elbow and drew 
him into a doorway that he was passing. "There's 
a cop around the corner," he whispered. 

Palin ! It was Palin ! 

At once, in a despairing eagerness, Jupp thrust 
into Palin's hands the watch, the wallet, and a roll 
of bills. (And here was the significant discrepancy 
that I have referred to. Jupp, in his account, never 
mentioned those guilty bills as separate from the 
single dollar that was found in the purse.) 

"Hullo!" Palin said. "Where'd the wad come 
from.? Onto' the wallet.?" 

Before Jupp could answer, Pitz shoved in be- 
tween them. "HoF on, now," he growled. "I'm 
in on this." 

"All right, Pittsey," Palin whispered. "Keep yer 
shirt on." 

"What!" Jupp choked. "Is that—Is he ?" 

"Sure," Palin said. "This 's the fullah I tol' y' 
about. This 's Pitz." 

Jupp turned without a word, with no more than a 

[166] 



WARDEN JUPP 



blind gesture of dismissal, and retreated to the side- 
walk. He was out of it ! He was free ! He began to 
giggle hysterically. And he was still giggling when 
he walked into the grasp of a policeman, who asked, 
*'What were you doin' in there?'' 

10 

Jupp shook his head. He could not answer. He 
could not think. 

"Uh.^" the policeman asked. 

He had begun to tremble. The policeman took 
him by the arm and led him back to the doorway. 
And Pitz and Palin dashed out at them, tripped the 
officer in a sudden scuffle that freed Jupp, and fled 
around the corner, with Jupp running frantically 
after them. 

Why did he run.^^ 

"I'll be darned if I know," he said. *'It wasn't 
me. It was my legs. They just ran away with me." 
(The automatic flight of instinctive guilt, in fact!) 

A shot sounded behind him. Something stung 
him on the ear. He clapped his hand to his head 
and knocked off his hat. He did not stop to pick 
it up. He dashed into an open doorway after Palin, 
and bounded up a dark staircase, and ran along dim 
halls, and leaped up more stairways, and climbed 
a ladder to the roof. There he slipped and fell; but, 
without taking his eyes off Palin, he scrambled to 
his feet again, and when Palin disappeared over a 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

parapet he followed at full tilt, jumped wildly, and 
fell five feet to the next housetop. That fall com- 
pletely "knocked the wind" out of him. Pitz and 
Palin were opening a roof scuttle. He lay where he 
had fallen beside them, till they thrust him through 
the opening and helped him down the ladder and 
let him lie gasping on the floor while they closed the 
trap door behind them and fastened it with a hook. 
Then they dragged him down the hall in the 
darkness, into a room, and shut and locked the door 
and stood listening, panting stealthily, while he 
writhed on the floor at their feet, his lungs struggling 
painfully to get breath. 

Palin prodded him with a foot and warned him 
to keep quiet. He groaned. Pitz struck a match 
and blew it out. They picked him up by the feet 
and shoulders, carried him to a corner of the room 
farthest from the door, and dropped him on a mat- 
tress there. Footsteps creaked on the flat tin roof 
over them, came and went slowly — and passed over 
to the next house. 

They waited in the darkness, a long time, silent. 
And then Pitz struck another match and lit a candle 
that stood, stuck in its own grease, on the table there. 

The circle of candlelight fell on a disorder of books 
and newspapers on the table top. It showed white 
on the faces of the two thieves. And Jupp, drawing 
deep, tremulous breaths, saw that he was in a little 
tenement-house room, unfurnished, its single win- 
dow covered with a dirty gray blanket that had 

[168 1 



WARDEN JUPP 



been nailed over the sash. "Now," Pitz growled, 
"let's see what you got." 

Palin pushed aside the papers and emptied his 
pockets. The watch interested him for a moment 
only. "Good fer three bucks," he said. The wallet 
had a single dirty dollar in it; he added that to the 
roll of bills and counted them. "Twenty -one good 
ones," he said, stroking them down lovingly. 
"Seven apiece." 

Pitz clawed over his share silently. 

"Here's yours, Jim," Palin said. 

Jupp, lying flat on his back, rolled his head from 
side to side. "I don't want them." 

Palin took four dollars, passed three to Pitz, and 
grinned, moistening his lips. But Pitz did not even 
notice the inequality of the division. He was glaring 
across the room at Jupp. 

"Why don't you want them?" he demanded. 

Jupp did not reply. 

"Stolen, eh.? Is that yer kick.?" 

"I've had enough," Jupp said to the ceiling. 
"No more of that for me." 

"Now, you look-a-here ! " Pitz threatened; and 
in a low, hoarse voice, gripping the table edge and 
leaning forward like an orator, he broke out in a 
long rigamarole of argument and self-justification 
to the amazed Jupp. He had worked out some sort 
of theory to the effect that all religion and all mo- 
rality were merely what he called "camp laws of 
warfare." Man lived by killing birds, fish, beasts, 

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and plants — and eating them. And he lived by 
killing his enemies in war and looting them. " *Thou 
shalt not kill' — what.^^ The human animals in yer 
own camp. Kill every thin' else that breathes! 
Kill yer country's enemy an' take all he's got! 
*Thou shalt not steal' — from yer neighbor's tent. 
Steal from birds, the beasts, from everything that 
lives ! An' steal all you can carry off from the tents 
of yer enemies. Yes! Is that right .^^ Is that reli- 
gion? I say there's no right an' no religion in it. 
An' I defy it!" 

"Aw, cut it out," Palin grumbled. 

** I defy it. I'll not keep their camp laws. I'm against 
them — against them all. I'll treat them the way they 
treat everything that's too weak to fight them. I'll 
take what I'm strong enough to take, no matter what 
tent I find it in. I'll live like the animals they hunt 
— like the birds — like the rats ! Yes, the rats ! I'd 
sooner be an honest rat than one o' these snivelin' 
hypocrites — like you — like you, you coward!" 

"For sake!" Palin blew out the light. 

"Shut up, will you. Shut up. Listen!" 

There were footsteps on the stairs. These ap- 
proached slowly, passed the door, and stopped as if 
at the ladder that led to the roof. Jupp, holding 
his breath, could hear a low grumble of voices and 
the scrape of a heavy boot. 

The steps went down the stairs again. In the 
darkness, Palin said, hoarsely, "There's blood on 
the ladder!" 

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WARDEN JUPP 



"Blood!" 

"They're lookin' downstairs." 

Pitz struck a match, shaded in the hollow of his 
hands. Palin rose from the floor, where he had been 
lying with an ear to the crack under the door. They 
both turned to Jupp. And the side of Jupp's head 
was bloody from the wound in the tip of his ear, and 
his hands were bloody, and there was blood on the 
mattress. 

Pitz held the dying match near the floor. A spot 
of blood glistened where Jupp had lain, just inside 
the doorway. 

"He shot me," Jupp said, weakly. He could see 
the hatred, the desperation of disgust and anger, that 
lowered in their faces. Then the match went out. 

"We 're up the flue ! " Palin said. "There's a trail 
to the ladder." 

Silence. 

Pitz said: "It's up to him. He's got to take the 
stuff an' beat it down the fire escape. We can clean 
up this mess an' get away with it." 

Palin did not reply. 

"Look-a-here, you," Pitz ordered. "There's a 
fire escape outside that window. It's up to you. 
You've got to beat it out o' this." 

Jupp swallowed. "No," he said, brave in the 
darkness. "You got me into it. You stole those 
things and put them in my pocket. I won't take 
them, and I won't run again as if I had taken them. 
I'm no thief and you know it." 
12 [ 171 ] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

*'By !" Pitz swore, ** you'll get out o* here 

er I'll throw y' out!" 

"Hoi' on now, Pittsey," Palin interposed. 
*' Jimmy, if you stay here, you'll be caught anyway. 
They'll search the whole damn house. They'll see 
that ear. You can't hide it. The only chanct you 
got's to beat it down the fire escape." 

"I won't," Jupp said. "If I got to go to jail, I'll 
go with you two that got me into this. You can't 
put it off on me again. You did that once. You 
put those things into my pocket, and I got scared 
and ran. I don't make that mistake again. I'm 
no thief. I don't care what's right or wrong. 
Say what you like. But I don't run again. Never ! " 

11 

He had raised his voice. And it was this that 
saved him. The two policemen had found blood at 
the threshold of the door. They knew that the thieves 
were hidden in the room. They knew that there was 
a fire escape from the window. They pretended to go 
downstairs together, but one of them, creeping back, 
watched and listened at the door while the other 
went down through the basement to the yard to 
cover the fire escape. The one at the door heard the 
argument between Jupp and his companions. 

Pitz, enraged, lost all caution and threatened and 
blustered in loud tones. Jupp refused to be intimi- 
dated. They had put those things in his pocket, 

[172] 



WARDEN JUPP 



he insisted. It was a dirty, sneaking thieves' trick. 
They were a pair of pickpockets and they had used 
him as a stall, without letting him know what they 
were doing. If he had been arrested, they would 
have let him go to jail alone. Well, if he had to go 
now, they would go with him. 

He was interrupted by a blow on the door. It 
was the springing of the trap. Pitz and Palin 
scuffled across the room with the secret noise of two 
startled beasts of darkness, and Jupp heard them 
struggling with the window. He cowered in his 
corner, faint with fear and loss of blood, the floor 
shaking under him with the hurrying feet and the 
battering on the door panels. 

In the confusion that followed the breaking of 
the door lock — the shout of voices, the flash of lights, 
the sound of breaking glass, the cries and curses of 
a hand-to-hand encounter between the policemen 
and the thieves who were caught at the window 
sill — Jupp lay against the wall, his arm over his 
eyes, expecting the blow of a night stick. And when 
the officers had dragged Pitz and Palin into the hall, 
and he understood that he had at least escaped the 
violence of the law, he lay quiet in the hope that 
he might be overlooked. 

Some one threw a light on him. He saw a police- 
man standing over him. 

"Your name's 'Jim,' is it.'^" 

Jupp replied that it was. 

"Jim what?" 

[1731 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Jupp told him. 

** Where did you meet these two?'* 

Jupp poured out his story. The policeman listened 
to it, thoughtfully sucking a tooth. In the middle 
of it he said, "You work fer Sutler, don't you.f^" 

Jupp admitted it. 

"I thought I'd seen you somewheres. Go ahead." 

When he had finished, the policeman said : "Well, 
you'll have to appear as a witness, anyway. Gimme 
yer address." As he wrote it down he remarked: 
"You was lucky that bullet didn't come an inch 
further to the right. The next time you get into a 
game like this you'd better stand an' take what's 
comin' to you." 

"You're blamed right I will," Jupp said, fervently. 

"All right. Run along. We'll let you know 
when we want you. Better go in the saloon down 
't the corner an' clean that blood off. " 

He helped Jupp to his feet and followed him out. 
Jupp stumbled eagerly down the stairs. He was 
conscious of nothing but a sick desire to be at home 
in his bed. 

"Where's yer hat.^^" the policeman asked, at the 
street door. 

Jupp put his hand up to his bare head. "I dunno. 
I lost it." 

"All right," the officer said, and he departed 
with the unemotional indifference of the man to 
whom this sort of thing is the routine of life. 

Jupp stood a long time in the doorway. You can 

[174] 



WARDEN JUPP 



imagine what he was thinking. I had to imagine it. 
Jupp could not tell me. All he could recall of the 
moment was this: as he went down the street 
toward the corner saloon he passed the doorway 
into which he had dashed with Palin, just after he 
had been shot in the ear; and here, on a sidewalk 
grating, he saw his hat. He picked it up and put it 
on. "Funny thing," he said to me. "That hat 
looked awful good." 

"How do you mean.^" 

"I don't know. I liked it." 

Now, you may think me absurd, but — that was a 
derby hat. It was the visible sign of his escape from 
criminality and the persecutions of guilt. In putting 
it on he put on respectability again and became a 
conventional citizen who could walk up the street 
without being noticed. The whole overwhelming 
emotion of his sense that he was free and unsus- 
pected must have accepted the act of donning that 
hat as something symbolic and memorably sig- 
nificant. And there, to me, is the unconscious 
reason why he never wore any but a derby hat after- 
ward. No other hats ever "looked good" on him, 
as he said. They never "felt good." He "liked a 
derby hat best." 

n 

He did not have to appear as a witness against 
Pitz and Palin in court. When he reached home 
that night he was shivering with a chill that made 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

him ache as if he were on a rack. Next morning he 
had the grippe. Two days later it was pneumonia. 
When he recovered, Pitz and Pahn were already 
serving their sentences. 

He did not see Palin again until, as the newly 
appointed warden of his penitentiary, he walked 
into the prison kitchen on his first visit of inspec- 
tion and found Palin washing dishes there. Palin 
did not recognize him. He went back to his office, 
thought the matter over, and, as his first act of 
prison reform, sent for Palin and talked with him. 

Apparently it was not a very fruitful talk. "You 
can't do anything for Palin," he said. "If people 
didn't train a dog, they wouldn't expect it to be- 
have. Palin's never had any training. He's never 
had any proper home, any decent parents, any- 
thing at all to tie to. The only person in the world 
he'd ever had any feeling for, as far as I could find, 
was this man Pitz. He'd had a letter from Pitz. I 
got him to write to Pitz and bring him on here. 
They're all right together. Pitz 's happy here. 
So 's Palin." 

I asked him about Pitz's anarchism. 

"Oh, that's just his conscience talking," Jupp 
said, shrewdly, "fighting with himself. He has 
character, Pitz has. Palin hasn't any. But Pitz 
would just about kill him if he threw me down, and 
Palin knows it." 

I wanted to say to Jupp: "You understand these 
men and you sympathize with them because you 

[176] 



WARDEN JUPP 



were a criminal once yourself, completely self- 
justified, but still a criminal in the eyes of the law. 
That night with Pitz and Palin made you see your- 
self in the first ex-con who appealed to you for help, 
and you went on helping them until you arrived 
here. You have unconsciously imbibed some of 
Pitz's philosophy about humanity's 'camp laws.' 
You have no theory about crime, because your 
theory is so unmoral that you daren't formulate it 
even in your own thoughts. You merely express it 
in your actions. That's why you're such a mystery ! ' ' 
Naturally, I said nothing of the sort. I said: 
"When the Governor goes out of oflSce, do you think 
you'll be able to hold the job here?" 

"No," he replied. "The gang '11 get me." 
"And all this work of yours will go for nothing?" 
He thought a long while. "I do it," he said, 
"because I like it. Some one will always be doing 
the same sort of thing, for the same reason. In 
time, people '11 learn it's the best way to run a 
prison. It takes time. It takes time. Don't worry." 
He lost his prison, as he had predicted, and he 
never got another. He disappeared, with Pitz and 
Palin, in the silence that soon afterward covered 
all the experiments of social and political reform 
in the Middle West. I heard that he had gone back 
into life insurance; and when Warden Osborne 
began his reforms in the New York state peni- 
tentiary I sent some of the newspaper clippings of 
Osborne's fight to Jupp with a note of comment. 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

It was characteristic of Jupp that he did not trouble 
to reply. Later, I heard that he was dead, but I 
have never been able to confirm the report. And 
I have no idea what became of Pitz and Palin. 

I did not write any "soul portrait" of Jupp — for 
obvious reasons. I never shall write one now, I 
suppose — unless this is it. 



V. PETER QUALE 

"We used to say T. Q.' as we say 'T. R.' or 'John 
D.' in common consonance with that rule of use 
by virtue of which always we put as briefly as is 
humanly possible whatever it is that circumstances 
compel us most frequently to communicate." 
— "Topics of the Times," New York Times. 



OLD P. Q.'s life has been written many times 
in edifying detail, but I have never seen his 
death receive more than its newspaper notice. His 
life has been glorified as a sort of latter-day fairy 
tale, and told and retold for the encouragement of 
young American ambition; but his death has been 
passed over as if it were just a date in his career 
— the closing date, of course, but no more significant 
than the word "finis" at the end of the story — 
whereas, like many another death, it was the real 
test and assay of his whole life and of all the values 
by which he had been living. ^ 

That is why, in attempting a portrait of old 
P. Q., I should like to pose him finally on his back 
in his sickbed, staring at the plaster root of the 
chandelier in his ceiling, rather than sitting on the 
summit of his money bags, sneering down on the 
Common People groveling before him, as he used 

1179 1 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

to sit and sneer in the newspaper cartoons of him 
when McKinley was President. 

As a matter of fact, outside of a caricature, old 
P. Q.'s nose could not be imagined in a sneer. It 
was not a sufficiently mobile nose to sneer with. 
He had a set expression. You might think it the 
expression of an autocratic ideal of grim impassivity. 
In a photograph, he always showed fierce-eyed 
eagle features, with his jaw firm and his mouth 
dangerous. And in his business encounters, among 
his fellow directors, or presiding at the many boards 
which he controlled, he faced friends and enemies 
alike, silent, impassive, superior, directing one of 
his confidential secretaries to make the notes he 
needed or to read aloud to the meeting the state- 
ments of the business in hand. And there was 
something impressive, something almost majestical, 
in the way he sat aloof at those conferences, in the 
midst of all the writing and reading and argument 
and consultation that went on around him, scarcely 
opening his lips, rarely moving his great lank bulk, 
until he had made his mind up. Then he shifted 
impatiently in his chair and leaned forward. If 
this movement was not enough to obtain silence, 
he cleared his throat. The heads turned to him; 
the voices ceased. He gave his decision in the 
meagerest words. If anyone who did not know his 
habits continued to argue after his conclusion had 
been announced, he merely waited in silence, with 
his eyes elsewhere, until it dawned on the stranger 

[180] 



PETER QUALE 



that the matter had been disposed of. Then, at a 
nod, one of his prime ministers took up the next item 
on the order of the day. He adjourned the meeting 
by rising and leaving the table; the necessary motion 
of adjournment was put after he had gone. 

All this had a fine look of autocracy. It was not 
autocracy alone. It was the mask of infirmity — 
the hussar dolman and the big sword that concealed 
the weakness of the Kaiser's withered arm. 

I got my first suspicion of that from his youngest 
son, Robert Quale, whom we called "Bob White" 
at college. 

Bob had a portrait of his father on the mantel- 
piece of his room, in the center of a chorus of photo- 
graphs of stage beauties. The old man looked 
especially fierce and domineering in that blandishing 
company. Bob grinned at his dad's glare. "Scared 
of the camera," he said. "Trying to intimidate it. 
He does it with everyone he meets. Funny how he 
gets away with it." He straightened up the picture 
affectionately. "He's like an old dog guarding his 
doorstep and bristling at everyone who has to come 
to his front porch." 

That was not the popular idea of Peter Quale. 
Scared? Bristling? On his guard? 

What was he on his guard against? 

Well, for one thing, "the old pirate," as Bob 
called him, had never had much education. In fact, 
to confess the incredible truth, he could hardly 
more than write his name presentably ; and wherever 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

possible he signed only his initials. (The New York 
Times notwithstanding, this was the origin, I take 
it, of the universal shortening of his name to 
"P. Q."). His handwriting was clumsy, childish, 
faltering. His spelling was disgraceful. He read 
like a schoolboy. Hence the confidential secretaries, 
and the prime ministers who acted as chairmen, and 
the royal aloofness from the petty details of reports 
and documents and the wording of motions and the 
making of notes. 

It struck me as one of those behind-the-scenes 
facts of life that seem so illuminating to adolescence. 
It interested me permanently in old P. Q., flattering 
me with a sense of superior knowledge whenever I 
saw him cartooned, or editorially attacked, or 
eulogized in a magazine series of "Great American 
Fortunes." Many of his associates must have 
known his little secret, yet it was never put in print 
so far as I saw, and none of his biographers betrayed 
it. I felt that I was "on to" something about him 
that vaguely explained qualities of his which im- 
posed on everybody else. And I still think that it 
accounts for his miraculous memory, which was 
infallible for the smallest details, because it had 
never been weakened by dependence on memoranda. 
And it accounts for his large mental grasp of very 
complicated undertakings, because he saw them 
not in reported words and persuasive arguments, 
but in the concrete facts which the words might 
cloud and the arguments misinterpret. And it 

[182] 



PETER QUALE 



accounts for his ability to carry all his business 
always in his head, and to go over it endlessly at 
his leisure, in the otherwise unoccupied silence in 
which he seemed to pass his life. 

% 

At any rate, as I say, it interested me perma- 
nently in old P. Q. and in Bob's gossip about him. 
The psychology of Bob's fondness for talking of him 
I did not understand. Bob seemed cheerfully dis- 
paraging and yet contemptuously proud of his dad. 
He was apparently puzzled by the old man, curious 
about him, and in some way inimical to him. It 
was an odd attitude for a son. And he told odd 
things about his father, among them one thing that 
seemed unimportant enough at the time, though I 
should consider it, now, as essential to a portrait of 
P. Q. as the eyes in his head. 

He had arrived in New York, on an immigrant 
ship from the north of Ireland, sometime during the 
famine of 1845-48. And he arrived alone, fatherless 
and motherless, a small boy in a strange world. 
His father, dying of what was called "ship fever," 
had been buried at sea. The mother, it was under- 
stood, had died in the old country. 

He went to work as a stable boy in the barns of 
a water-front trucking company. He was big and 
strong for his age, and in a few years he was driving 
a truck himself. He must have looked like a young 

[183] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

charioteer at the reins, tall, square-shouldered, well 
balanced on his feet. He had that air even in his 
old age. 

Out of his savings he soon bought a team of horses 
and a wagon, and began hauling dirt from excava- 
tions. Next thing, he was taking contracts for such 
work, with gangs of men and trains of wagons under 
his orders. Then he became a building contractor. 
He bought land and he erected houses. He owned 
an office building. He laid street-car lines and took 
part payment in company bonds. He laid gas pipes 
and mains, and held a mortgage on a gas company. 
When the early gas wars ended he owned a control- 
ling interest in the consolidation. He became a 
traction magnate by a similar process of acquiring 
liens on the actual properties of the street railways 
while speculators made and lost fortunes in the 
stocks. He never speculated, but whenever a trac- 
tion company went into bankruptcy and was reor- 
ganized, it was found that he owned its real assets. 
He was busy, in that way, all through the Civil War 
and the Reconstruction period and the various booms 
and panics that came and went for twenty years after. 
Nothing but an earthquake could have shaken his 
financial stability. His fortune was all bricks and 
stones and steel and mortar and pipes and rails. 

"Queer old bird," Bob said once. "He knows the 
price of everything that you can handle. The mater 
bought a water pitcher once — very showy — and asked 
him what he thought it had cost, when it came on 

[184] 



PETER QUALE 



the table. He took it up and looked at it and put 
it down. *Thirty-seven cents,' he said. And she was 
furious. She thought there must be a price mark on 
it. There wasn't. It had cost thirty-seven cents, 
but she thought it looked like five dollars at least." 

I suggested that he had learned values from the 
hardships of his youth. 

"Hardships nothing," Bob said. "That stuff 
about the penniless barefooted Irish boy is all 
buncombe. When he landed in this country, one 
of the first things he did was to bank a hundred 
pounds that he had in his pocket." 

"A hundred pounds! Five hundred dollars .f^" 

"Yes, and he never drew any of it out. He began 
adding to it right away, and he's been adding to it 
ever since." 

"Where did he get it.?" 

"Search me. And another thing. He's not Irish. 
Quale is a Manx name. I told him so once, playing 
checkers with him, and I saw that he knew it. He 
looked fussed. If he came from the north of Ireland, 
I'm a Pomeranian. I tried to make him talk about 
Ireland, one night, and he just growled that he didn't 
remember anything about it. He remembers some- 
thing or other that he doesn't want to talk about." 

It seemed natural to me that a man in P. Q.'s 
position should not care to talk about his origin. 
I was more interested in Bob's account of how they 
played checkers together. The mighty P. Q. brood- 
ing over a checkerboard! Here was an aspect of 

[ 185 1 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

greatness that made even the caricatures of the 
cartoonists look stilted. "Samson struggling with 
a match box." 

He played checkers at night because he read so 
laboredly, and he had never been a great theater- 
goer, and he considered chess a waste of intellect, 
and he had some antiquated moral feeling against 
cards as the implements of improvidence. His 
moral feeling, however, did not prevent him from 
cheating at checkers if he were not watched. 

"He'll steal one of your kings off the board if 
you're winning," Bob said, "and most people are 
so afraid of him they'll let him do it. He doesn't 
do it with me. The first time I caught him at it, 
I said: *Here! You've sneaked one of my kings off!' 

"He glared at me. 'Sneaked! Sneaked!' 

"*Yes,' I said, *you've taken it off that king row. 
You put it back.' 

"He tried to bluff me out of it, growling and 
snapping at me. I put it back myself. *It was 
there,' I said, *and I remember it was there. Go 
ahead. It's your move.' 

"He said something about having 'brushed it off 
by accident, maybe,' and I let it go at that, but I 
knew he'd taken it off purposely, because, after a 
little while his lips began to twitch. That's about 
as near as he ever gets to a smile." 

I doubted that story. Bob was not a brilliant 
student. I did not suppose that it would be neces- 
sary for one of the omnipotent directing minds of 

[186] 



PETER QUALE 



Manhattan to steal men off the checkerboard in 
order to beat him. 

Bob explained: "Did you ever see an old book 
called Tlie American Draught Player, written by a 
man named Spayth? No? Well, all the possible 
games on a checkerboard are worked out in it from 
the very first move. If you learn off a few games 
like 'Single Corner' and 'Old Fourteenth,' it's prac- 
tically impossible to beat you. I found that book 
years ago, in a second-hand store on Twenty-third 
Street, and I began learning the games by heart, 
until now I can lick the old man whenever I want 
to, and when I don't want to I can make the game 
a draw. He will stick at it sometimes till three in 
the morning, trying to come out a game ahead of 
me, but I never let him." 

"Why not.?" 

"If he had his way I'd never be able to call my 
soul my own. He does it to everybody except me. 
That's why I never ask him for money. I get it 
from the mater. I won't let him buy me and I 
won't let him scare me. And I'm able to get along 
with him better than anybody. If I let him beat 
me at checkers, he'd soon be treating me the way 
he does all the rest. 



Perhaps I should explain that Bob, having been 
expelled from a number of preparatory schools in 
the States, had been exiled to Upper Canada College 
13 1 187 1 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

in Toronto, with some idea of getting him away from 
evil associates, I suppose. He had either conformed 
to Canadian discipline or he had hoodwinked it, 
and he had been graduated into Toronto University, 
though without honors, as a special student. It 
was in the university lecture rooms that I first met 
him — a small, black-haired youth, quick in his 
gestures and swiftly contemptuous in his speech. 
He did not belong to the sporting ring in Residence, 
for several obvious reasons: he was on very short 
allowance from his mother, so that he could not 
keep pace with the expenditures of the college 
bloods; he had no physical capacity for athletics 
and no congenial interest in them to make him at 
his ease with the Residence coterie; and finally, 
he seemed much older in his mind than any of us 
and regarded the dissipations of our moneyed stu- 
dents as rather childish. "Cutting their milk teeth 
on beer bottles," he said. He did not conceal his 
superior sophistication. They retaliated by calling 
him "the Cold Bird," and "Young Tenderloin" 
and "Little Punksticks" because he smoked ciga- 
rettes incessantly — ^Egyptian cigarettes. 

On the other hand, he was equally alien to the 
studious college "plugs." He attended lectures 
irregularly and failed in his examinations. What 
knowledge he acquired he seemed to get by some 
process of occult absorption. He played a piano in 
his room when he should have been studying, and 
he was a connoisseur in musical comedies. Common 

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report credited him with being idly dissipated, and 
he disappeared sometimes for days; but he had no 
confidants in his dissipations, so that he could not 
be accused of setting a bad example; and the author- 
ities blinked at his absences. 

We became friends as a result of mere propin- 
quity. In many of the classes the students were 
assigned seats alphabetically, and when there were 
no " P's " to come between us, he sat beside me. He 
was interesting — totally unlike a Canadian boy — 
and appealing in his friendless independence. We 
got into the habit of spending our evenings together. 

I did not begin to understand him until I saw him 
in his home, on an Easter visit to New York; and 
then it became obvious that his attitude to his father 
was due to the circumstance that there were two fac- 
tions in the family and Bob was of his mother's party. 
He was fifteen or twenty years younger than either 
of his two married brothers, John Quale, who was in 
Wall street, and Paul Arbuthnot Quale, who acted as 
his father's deputy in charge of the Quale real estate. 
These two had their own homes and their own inter- 
ests. They came on Sunday evenings, with their 
wives, to the old house off Gramercy Park, and the 
wives chatted with each other and with Mrs. Quale 
— chiefly about their children — but the men were 
mostly silent. They seemed completely indifferent 
to Bob, and he to them. I had never seen brothers 
show so little mutual interest or affection. 

John, born in the early days of his father's for- 

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tune, liad been sent to a business college. He had 
made an independent career for himself in specu- 
lative finance. Paul had gone through a sectarian 
college and come out with a strong sense of the 
moral power of money in support of revealed reli- 
gion. Neither of them smoked or drank or enjoyed 
any convivial vices. Bob was undoubtedly an 
unconscious protest against them. He had been 
his mother's child; she had refused to let P. Q. 
dictate his upbringing, and she had tried to educate 
him *'like a gentleman." I don't know whether 
she thought she had succeeded. To the others of 
the family, of course, his habits were a scandal. He 
had long since shown his brothers that they could 
not manage him. They ignored him, therefore. 

The house was a large, double house, of which 
Mrs. Quale occupied one half and her husband the 
other. Bob had an upper floor to himself, on her 
side of the establishment, with a billiard room that 
had once been a nursery, and a large sitting room 
with shelves of books which he never opened, and a 
grand piano. His mother sat there with us one 
evening while he played restlessly; but for the most 
part we were left to our own amusements. She had 
evidently learned that her affectionate anxiety grated 
on him and she concealed it from him. 

"You will look after him.? " she said to me, hastily, 
while I was waiting for him in the hall, one evening. 
"I'm glad you like him." And she added, almost 
in a guilty whisper, "He's a dear boy." 

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She was still a handsome woman, younger than 
her husband, but with a nervously apprehensive 
manner and a painful mouth. (The expression of 
that mouth made me sj^mpathize with Bob's feeling 
toward his father.) Her time appeared to be wholly 
occupied with household matters and the meetings 
of some few boards of charitable aid. The house 
was spotlessly efficient, though old-fashioned. Affairs 
of house cleaning or redecoration or repair were going 
on in some corner of it always, under her supervision. 
I thought her tragically commonplace. 

I saw about the house only one thing that seemed 
characteristic of old P. Q. That was an antique 
framed motto in early English black letter on his 
library wall. There was a legend that it had been 
given to him by J. P. Morgan, but I suspect that 
he treasured it for the sentiment as much as for the 
association. It read: 

A secret that is known to one — 
A secret known to God alone. 
A secret that is known to two — 
A secret known to God knows who. 

I should say it might have been engraved on P. 
Q.'s upper lip. 

He was out of town when Bob and I arrived; and 
when he returned he was absorbed in office routine 
and board meetings and business luncheons and 
directors' dinners and evening conferences of one 
sort or another. He breakfasted before we were out 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

of bed, and he walked early to his office — in the 
old gas building on Union Square — with a secretary 
who brought him his mail and telegrams at seven. 
He carried a heavy walking stick because he had 
once been attacked on the street, and he limped 
from a twinge of rheumatism in the knee, on the 
morning that I saw him, but his carriage was other- 
wise erect and forceful, and the defiant poise of his 
head and shoulders was accentuated by the rakish 
angle at which he wore a soft hat slanted down on 
his eyebrows. Even at a distance you would know 
he was "a character." 

We had one dinner with him — a formal family 
dinner given to some financiers whose names I have 
forgotten. Among them there was a Londoner who 
represented a group of British investors. As we 
went in to the table Bob whispered to me that this 
man had arrived wearing a monocle, and old P. Q. 
had growled at him, "I can't talk to you with that 
damn thing in your eye." And the Englishman had 
been so surprised that the glass had dropped from 
his eye socket and he had not put it back. He looked 
rather bewildered throughout the meal, either be- 
cause of his reception or because the lack of the 
monocle affected his sight. 

The others had an air of suppressed amusement. 
P. Q. was dour and silent. It appeared that he had 
been to Washington, on some business about a bill 
in the Senate which he wished to have passed. It 
had been passed. The men at the table, congratu- 

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lating him on his success, asked him what arguments 
he had used . ' * Arguments ! " he grumbled . ' ' They 
knew all the arguments. Been listening to argu- 
ments for a month. I hadn't any arguments. I just 
damned it through." 

The others accepted the opportunity to relieve the 
laughter which they had been restraining. The Eng- 
lishman seemed more bewildered than ever. P. Q. 
looked up, blinking against a puckered twinkle of the 
eyes. For a moment I thought that he was going to 
smile. I said so, under my voice, to Bob. He nodded 
sourly. "He's getting old," he muttered. "Losing 
his self-control." 

His mother shook her head at him. The others sat 
too far away to hear. The table was unnecessarily 
large, in a room so vast that the shaded candlelight 
did not more than reach the walls. It was a warm 
spring; the house was overheated; and the French 
windows of the dining room had been opened upon a 
balcony. With the night air drawing in on us, and the 
candlelight scarcely showing the high ceiling, I felt 
as if we were eating outdoors on a cloudy night. 

The talk at the upper end of the table ran into a 
discussion of the attacks that were being made by 
politicians and newspapers upon the owners of 
public utilities. I listened with a divided mind, 
trying to picture to myself what life must look like 
to the old nabob at the head of the board. A large 
map of the city hung in his library, with his real- 
estate holdings marked on it in red, and his street 

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railways crawling over it in blue, and his gas pipes 
wriggling through it in yellow, and patches of his 
docks and car barns and gas tanks all over it. I had 
been wandering around town with Bob — who was 
showing me the sights — and I could visualize many 
of these colored lines and patches in terms of build- 
ings and constructions. How did it feel to live in a 
city that for more than half a century you had been 
erecting as you would a house .^^ How would you 
feel toward the successive generations of tenants 
who leased the house from you, and paid you rent, 
and complained of exactions and inconveniences, 
and now suddenly began to talk as if it was, after 
all, tJieir house to which your title was in part no 
more than *'a public utility franchise"? 

I judged that you would feel as contemptuously 
indifferent to the talk as old P. Q.'s silence indicated 
he felt while he ate and listened to the men before 
him. Generations of tenants had passed through his 
streets and houses as passengers got on and off his 
cars. He and the houses and the cars and the rails 
remained. He must feel as permanent and solid as 
his properties. And as secure. 

I began imagining myself in P. Q.'s position, at the 
head of his table, owning his fortune, enjoying his 
security. It was a mighty proud and comfortable 
feeling of solid permanence founded on brick and 
stone and metal. It was more than a sense of 
wealth and power. I felt (in the person of P. Q.) 
that if I had wanted merely wealth, I should have 

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speculated and bought stocks and not confined my 
holdings entirely to tangible assets of material con- 
struction. And if I had been ambitious for distinction 
and power, I should have educated myself to take my 
place among cultivated people, and put on a silk hat, 
and been undisturbed before a monocle. No. What 
I had needed was security — from that very first day 
when I landed friendless at Castle Garden and 
hastened to put my five hundred dollars in the bank. 

Security. Security from what.^ 

And then I remembered Bob saying that his 
father had arrived in New York with something in 
his past that he wouldn't talk about; and I saw 
myself guiltily banking my five hundred, and 
silently entrenching myself in the ownership of land 
and houses, and building a shell of property around 
myself, confiding in no one, talking as little as 
possible, afraid of people, trying to intimidate them 
because I was afraid of them, and bristling like an 
old dog on the doorstep of my personality, on my 
guard against any intrusion, even an affectionate 
intrusion, so that even my wife 

I must have been staring at old P. Q. with an 
expression of hypnotized clairvoyance, for when he 
looked down the table and saw me he frowned, and 
then focused on me a queer, startled glare. It was a 
look that lasted only an instant before I came to my- 
self and caught up my fork and busied myself with 
my food. But during that instant I must have con- 
fronted him with the eyes of astounded speculation. 

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Bob had not noticed my expression, but he saw 
his father's. " What were you doing? " he whispered. 
"Making faces at him?" 

I pretended that I didn't know. "I may have 
been," I said. "I was looking at him and thinking 
of something else." 

He giggled. "You'll be sticking out your tongue 
at him next." 

He told his mother that I had "made a snoot" 
at the old man, and he stuck to his story, snickering 
hysterically, in the face of her distress. It was a 
feeble enough joke, and his pleasure in it probably 
came as much from my embarrassment as from the 
fact that he was tickling his own desire to cheek his 
father. He invented an excuse for me. He said 
that as a loyal Colonial I resented his dad's insult 
to the British monocle. Throughout the rest of 
the dinner he continued snorting and choking to 
himself. When we got to his room he laughed 
uproariously, helpless when I pummeled him, and 
wiping his eyes weakly between his convulsions. 
It was good to see him laugh. 

The incident seemed insignificant at the time. It 
had its consequences. 

4 

That same evening something else occurred that 
might have interested P. Q. more than my uncom- 
plimentary conception of his psychology — if he had 
known of either. 

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PETER QUALE 



Bob had bought tickets for "a show," a musical 
comedy, if I remember, at the old Manhattan 
Theater on Broadway. We arrived late, and it was 
not till after the end of the first act that we found 
the name of Angela Quayle in the cast. It caught 
Bob's eye, of course. And during the second act 
we amused ourselves trying to decide which of the 
chorus Angela Quayle might be. We got no clue. 

There was a red-headed soprano who had a small 
part among the principals. "I used to know her," 
Bob volunteered. (Her name was Dolly something 
or other — Dolly Varley, let us say.) At the end of 
the act, he said: "I'm going to find out from her 
which is Angela Quayle. Wait here a minute." 

The third act was well under way before he re- 
turned, and he had not only found out which was 
Angela Quayle; he had invited her and Dolly Varley 
to supper after the theater. I felt very much the 
young man about town. He whispered: **I told 
them you were a Canadian playwright down here 
seeing the managers. You'll have to live up to 
that." It was a part that rather went to my head. 

Angela Quayle proved to be a tall, dark girl, 
graceful and demure. She did not try to see us 
across the footlights, but Dolly Varley found us in 
the third row, and smiled at Bob, and then took me 
in with an absent-minded scrutiny while she sang. 
I strove to look unconscious of my importance, and 
still look important. I think I failed. 

Fortunately for the professional standing of 

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Canadian playwrights, Bob knew the etiquette of 
stage doors and the passport for doorkeepers; and 
we met the girls conveniently, at the foot of the 
dressing-room stairs, in the wings of a stripped 
stage; and they did not ask the names of any of 
the managers whom I had been seeing. They were 
not interested in me at all, in fact. Before the 
affair was ended, I understood thoroughly that a 
provincial dramatic author, quite unproduced, was 
not a prize behind the scenes — certainly not when 
he was in social competition with an heir of the 
Quale millions. 

Dolly Varley proved to be older than she had 
looked in her stage role, and both she and Angela 
were quietly dressed and matter-of-fact in manner. 
They confessed to being hungry, and voted to go 
to a neighboring rathskeller for something hearty 
to eat. The expedition rapidly lost the air of an 
adventure. They behaved as sedately as any two 
intelligent girls who earn their own livings and are 
economically independent of the need of coquetry. 
I began to see that I had been deceived by the 
traditions of fiction in the matter of actresses. 

And I began to see, too, that Bob had arranged 
the party not merely for his amusement or mine. 
He wanted to know where Angela Quayle had come 
by her name. Was it a stage name only? 

Well, her real name was Angela Priestly, but 
Quayle was her mother's maiden name. 

Where had they come from? 

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PETER QUALE 



Her mother had come from England, but she had 
married in this country. 

He began to show some excitement. "Isn't she 
Manx? Didn't she come from the Isle of Man?" 

Why? 

"Well," Bob said, "if she did, I'll bet you're 
relatives of ours." 

She smiled at his seriousness. "It wouldn't do 
me any good if we were, would it?" 

"Yes," he answered, unexpectedly. "It might. 
Find out for me, will you? I mean it." 

"Oh, very well," she said. 

She made no more of it than that, and I did not 
hear Bob refer to the matter again; but when we had 
taken the girls to their addresses and we were driving 
home together in a hansom — which was Bob's con- 
stant ideal of bachelor luxury — I asked him whether 
he really thought she might be a relative; and he said : 
"I don't know. I hope so. I like her. Don't you?" 

I liked her well enough. 

"Rotten shame," he said, "a girl like that working 
in the chorus. I'll bet she's had a tough time." 

I regretted he'd told her I was a playwright. 

Why? 

"Why! Because she's been as silent about it as 
if you'd told her — I don't know whatr 

Bob laughed. "She was probably afraid you'd 
pull a manuscript out of your pocket and try to read 
her a first act." 

It seemed to him a good joke. When he saw that 

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I was really surly about it, he promised, "The next 
time I see her I'll tell her the truth." 

And that incident had its consequences, also. 



He did not see her again during my visit, and he 
said nothing about her when he rejoined me in 
our classes at the university. If I knew that he 
was corresponding with her, it made so little impres- 
sion on me that I have forgotten it. I was busy 
trying to prepare myself for the approaching dooms- 
day of examinations. He announced suddenly that 
he was done with exams, with college, with the whole 
silly cram that was called education. I did not 
connect her with his decision. I supposed that it 
was simply the revolt of the idle rich against intel- 
lectual labor. He was more than usually restless, 
impatient, contemptuous, and unhappy. He came 
to me in the library one sunny morning. 

"Good-by," he said. '*I'm going. I'm packed." 
And he said it loudly, so as to show his scorn for the 
regulations that required silence in the reading room. 

Several students near us turned and hissed, 
" Ssh ! " angrily. He invited them to mind their own 
driveling business, in a voice that was audible to 
the whole world. All the free spirits in the neigh- 
borhood accepted that as a challenge to an inter- 
change of insults. An indignant hubbub arose. 
The desk clerk rapped in vain for order. I hurried 

[200] 



PETER QUALE 



Bob out to the hall, through a small riot of catcalls 
and hisses, to which he kept replying in spite of my 
attempts to hush him as we went. We were over- 
taken at the door by an angry attendant with a 
summons to the librarian's office. Bob replied that 
the librarian could go to bottomless perdition, as 
far as he was concerned, and walked out. It was 
not so simple a situation for me. I had an un- 
comfortable half hour, trying to clear myself some- 
what, without putting all the blame on Bob. I 
escaped with a week's suspension from the privileges 
of the library, and I hurried off to Bob's room. 

He was gone. 

He wrote apologetically from the train and again 
when he reached New York; but I was too busy to 
reply, and I was still peevish about the scene in the 
library, and I was also glad to have him off my mind. 
When the exams were over I had problems of my 
own to face, though they were not at all the prob- 
lems that would worry a millionau'e's son. In the 
silence that came between us I got no hint of the 
events that were preparing. 

Then he wrote, reminding me of our conversa- 
tions about the impossibility of making a living as 
a writer in Canada, and inviting me to try a pre- 
liminary attack on New York from the hospitality of 
his rooms. "Have something important to tell 
you," he explained. "Very important. Need your 
advice." New York, however, had frightened me; 
and even when his mother wrote, obviously at his 

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instigation, I shivered, in reluctant refusal, and 
hung back. 

There was another long silence. I spent part of 
it day dreaming scenes in which I bluffed a Park 
Row editor into giving me a summer try-out in his 
city room on the strength of the fact that I had 
written verses for the college paper — some of which 
the paper had published. I did not succeed in 
making the scenes quite credible. Bob wrote that 
he was in trouble and needed my aid. That settled 
it. I decided that I would not go ; that I had troubles 
enough where I was. And having triumphed over 
temptation in this decision, and convinced myself 
of my essential strength of character, when Mrs. 
Quale wired: "Please come. He needs you," 
naturally I packed my trunk and went at once. 

Bob met me in the ferryhouse at Twenty-third 
Street. In the cab he told me that he intended to 
marry Angela Quayle. And while I was still in a 
confusion of doubtful congratulations, he announced 
that P. Q.'s father, who had died at sea, and Angela's 
grandmother, who had been abandoned on the Isle 
of Man, were husband and wife. And when I 
objected that he could hardly marry his father's 
niece, he said, coldly : " I'm not his son. I've known 
it for years." 

6 

If I have failed to give the quality of a dramatic 
denouement to these astounding statements, it is 

[2021 



PETER QUALE 



because there was no true dramatic quality what- 
ever in the scene. It was casual and self-conscious 
and distracted. Bob had a manner of bitter indiffer- 
ence to what he was saying; and when he said, "I'm 
not his son," he leaned forward to look out the cab 
window, at men working in the street, before he 
added, "I've known it for years." I was staring at 
him, at once stupefied and incredulous. He looked 
at me challengingly. I looked away, but not before 
I saw that his manner was assumed in order to 
conceal emotion. 

"Well," I decided, "this is a sweet mess." 

He made a sound in his nose that was probably 
intended to be an amused snort of disgusted agree- 
ment. "Besides," he said, "he's dying." 

"^^o'5 dying?" 

"The old man." 

"Good heavens! I haven't seen anything " 



"No. They've given it out that he has rheuma- 
tism. It's neuralgia of the heart. Angina pectoris. 
He's likely to pop off any minute." 

The cab rattled and jolted along, with sudden 
jerks and traffic stoppages. I felt that if we could 
only be stationary and quiet somewhere for a 
moment, I might realize the situation sufficiently to 
say something adequate and think of something 
helpful. We dropped a back wheel into a hole in 
the pavement just as I began, "This is awful " 

"Town's always torn up in the summer," he 
apologized. "Mending pavements." 

14 [ 203 1 



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"I mean it's awful for your mother." 

"Oh." He nodded. 

I could think of nothing more to say. 

"I haven't told her practically anything — except 
that I want to marry Angela." 

If I had had any sense at all, I might have de- 
manded some convincing proofs of his statements. 
How did he know that he was not P. Q.'s son? How 
had he learned that P. Q. and his father had run 
away and — did he mean that the five hundred 
dollars with which P. Q. had landed was guilty 
money? 

I got up courage at last to ask him that. 

He said: "I suppose so. They left her in poverty 
there, with a child — ^Angela's mother. She never 
heard of either of them afterward. If he weren't 
dying I'd go to him and make him fork out for her. 
He's not likely to leave me much. And the other 
two will never give up anything. And I can't tell 
mother about it. I don't want her to know he's 
been — that kind of — " He choked up. 

He choked up, and suddenly, in the midst of my 
horror and my sympathy, I found myself filled 
with an outrageous sense of exultation. To put it 
too flatly, I felt that life, after all, could be worthy of 
an author! I felt like a student of landscape paint- 
ing who had stumbled on a scene that was in the 
colors of Turner really. And I struggled to repress 
the feeling, with disgust, in silence, dazzled by the 
bright romantic glamour of a guilty fortune, an 

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PETER QUALE 



illegitimate heir, an erring wife, a whole plot of old 
crimes discovered on a deathbed. How stranger 
than fiction! And how dramatically elucidative of 
everything that had puzzled me about the family — 
P. Q.'s pursuit of security, Bob's revolt and his 
unhappiness, the absence of all brotherly affection, 
the division in the house, the mother's painful 
mouth. It seemed that I had penetrated to the 
old man's criminal secret, that evening at dinner. 
I began even to believe that he must have seen the 
accusation in my eyes and been disturbed by it. 

I was recalled to the immediate realities by the 
sight of Gramercy Park. What was I to say.^^ How 
was I to behave .f^ How, especially, was I to face 
Mrs. Quale.? 

I said to Bob: "Don't let your mother know I'm 
here yet. I want to talk this over with you before 
I see her." By which I meant that I wanted to 
conspire with him in the inventing of some plau- 
sible untruth with which to deceive her. Accord- 
ingly, we sneaked up to his rooms and locked 
ourselves in. And there, with him sunken in a large 
and melancholy-looking armchair while I walked 
up and down portentously before him, we went over 
and over the perplexities of his tragic situation. 

He wanted to marry Angela Quayle. Well, since 
there was no real relationship between them, he 
might do so. But he had told his mother of his 
love affair under solemn pledge of secrecy; she had 
been horrified at the thought of his marrying a 

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chorus girl, and she had kept his secret only because 
she knew that if his father learned of it he might be 
disinherited. His father was already sufficiently 
dissatisfied with him. It was vmlikely that Bob 
would receive any large share of the estate. Most 
likely he would be provided with a small allowance 
from a trust fund, to be administered by his 
brothers. At best, then, if he waited for his in- 
heritance he would be able to offer Angela Quayle 
only a niggardly incomplete rectification of the 
injustice that had been done her mother and her. 

And Bob had achieved a far from niggardly moral 
magnification of that injustice. The Quale fortune 
had begun with P. Q.'s five hundred dollars in the 
bank. This money had been as good as stolen. 
P. Q.'s sister and his sister's child were entitled to a 
sum that should not only make restitution — with 
fifty years' compound interest — but recompense 
them for a lifetime of poverty, and so absolve P. Q. 
from his accumulated guilt. Good. But if Bob 
were to put in his claim for them he would have to 
prove who they were. And if he proved that, how 
was he to marry Angela? How was he to marry her 
without coming out openly as no son of P. Q..^^ 
Imagine the effect of such a bomb! He could not 
face it. He could not even face the dying man with 
the accusation about the five hundred dollars. He 
could only stew around, and suffer horribly, and 
agonize with shame and guilt and disillusionment. 

Put down this way, in more or less coherent 

[206] 



PETER QUALE 



sentences, the muddle seems intricate enough. But 
it was much more bewildering as I tried to arrange it 
in my mind from Bob's jumbled mass of discon- 
nected mutterings and exclamations of emotion and 
brooding silences that ended in irrelevant replies 
when I was trying to get clear answers to my ques- 
tions about the facts. For instance, when I dared to 
ask him, in embarrassed indirectness, how he had 
learned that he was not P. Q.'s son, he replied, with 
reserve: "I've always known it. Since I was six 
years old. I overheard her say it. She was crying 
about something. She said — she said she was glad 
of it." And that was as definite as he would be. 

Of the relationship between P. Q.'s father and 
Angela's grandmother, he said: "There's no doubt 
about it. Ajigela's grandfather was a tailor. He 
took his son, and ran away, and left them to starve. 
When I found that out I said to mother, 'Grand- 
father was a tailor, wasn't he?' She looked star- 
tled. She wanted to know where I'd heard it. She 
admitted it was true. There's something else be- 
sides. I don't want to talk about it." 

At the end of an hour I had to accept the situation 
as he saw it. And, accepting it, the question was, 
what was he to do? What would I advise him to do? 
He had told no one but me. He had not even told 
Angela. And I could see no sailing course whatever 
for him. I could see nothing but the rocks and the 
shoals and the dangerous cross-currents and the 
certainties of shipwreck. The best I could do was 

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to hold him back. And I was still holding him when 
his mother sent word that she wished to see me. 

"Look here. Bob," I said, "I'll tell her you're 
worrying because you want to marry Angela and 
you've found out something that makes it impossi- 
ble. And I've promised not to tell anybody what 
it isr 

That seemed innocently ingenious. 



It was not ingenious enough to satisfy Mrs. Quale. 
She studied me anxiously, waiting, reserving her 
suspicion till I had finished. Then she asked, "Why 
is he behaving this way with his father?" 

"What way.?" 

"Refusing to see him." 

I tried to look blank, without blushing. 

"He hasn't gone to him since he was brought 
home. Peter wanted him to play checkers one 
night, and he ran away, out of the house." 

I shook my head, to express ignorance, looking 
down at the floor. 

"And he's drinking," she said, hoarsely, "with 
his father dying. It's terrible. He's not a bad boy. 
There's something the matter. And no one will 
tell me." 

She was entirely pitiful, and that surprised me. 
Perhaps I had expected to feel some moral disappro- 
bation of her as the guilty victim of her own trans- 

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gression. I was so moved that I could only stammer : 
**I — I'm awfully sorry, I can keep him from 
drinkmg." 

"I don't understand him," she said. "I don't 
understand any of them. They're all so queer. And 
he's dying. They don't seem to realize it." 

I glanced at her furtively. She was staring ahead 
of her, at nothing, blinded by her tears, her eyebrows 
twitching in a pathetic sort of bewildered frown. 
It was a childish expression, helpless, inadequate. 
I could not endure it. I ran away. I left her 
without any apology and hurried back to Bob. 

"All right," I said, wiping my forehead. "That '11 
give us time to turn round. Now listen. You'll 
have to tell your brothers, sometime — your eldest 
brother, anyway. He'll be the head of the family 
when — if the estate's left to him, and it's sure to be. 
He'll feel the way you do about this. He'll want 
to keep it from your mother as much as you 
do. And he'll not risk telling it to a man with heart 
disease. Why not try him out — with the part about 
Angela, anyway.? Perhaps if you can make him 
feel that there may be a public scandal, a law suit 
or something — I don't know. They have some 
sort of legal claim, haven't they.f^ And even 
if they haven't, they've a moral claim, and you 
can insist on it yourseK. It's the only opening 
that I can see. You'll have to begin somewhere, 
you know." 

I was not very clear about it at first, but the more 

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we talked the clearer it became. P. Q. was dying, 
and no one wished to make trouble for him; but 
Angela and her mother had a claim on the estate, 
and unless something could be done for them, all 
kinds of public scandal might ensue. It was John 
Quale's duty to handle the problem tactfully, diplo- 
matically, without worrying his father about it and 
without exposing his father's guilty past to anybody 
else. Bob need not speak of his own interest in 
Angela. Still less need he disclose "the secret of his 
birth," as you might say. He could be quite dis- 
interested, rather dutiful, and only concerned to 
save his father's good name. '' 

By the time we had eaten a restaurant luncheon 
together — conspiring like a pair of amateur black- 
mailers at a table in a corner — we had persuaded 
ourselves that our scheme was Machiavellian. Bob 
phoned to catch his brother in his office. I saw him 
start on his way to the interview, pale but un- 
flinching; and I went back to his rooms to wait for 
news of his success. 

The house was hushed and guarded, with a door- 
keeper to see that no one rang the bell and a secre- 
tary to winnow out callers in an anteroom. P. Q. 
was conducting his affairs from his sickbed, and 
there was a noiseless coming and going of messen- 
gers and confidential clerks and business associates 
from his side of the house; but Mrs. Quale had 
refused herself to all visitors, and there was no one 
to be seen in her apartments but a silent butler in 

[2101 



PETER QUALE 



the entrance hall. P. Q. for more than a month had 
endured an intermittent pain in his breast without 
speaking of it. He had ignored it as he ignored his 
rheumatism or anything else that tried to interfere 
with his having his own way in the world. Then, 
one morning, arriving at his office, he had been taken 
with a seizure so violent that he had collapsed 
breathless in his chair and sunk face down on his 
desk blotter. His physician, hastily summoned, 
had recognized the fatal symptoms of angina pec- 
toris. P. Q. had been brought back to his home, 
grimly silent, and put in his bed. The doctor had 
told him the truth. He had taken it without blink- 
ing. He had not referred to it, himself, since, and 
none of his family had dared to speak openly to him 
about it. He had acted — and he continued to act — 
on the fiction that he was bedridden with rheuma- 
tism, and everyone on his side of the house either 
accepted, or pretended to accept, his repudiation of 
the truth. It was only in our half of the establish- 
ment that the lurking presence of death was not 
altogether snubbed and discountenanced. 

This annoyed me. It may have been that I did 
not like to think of P. Q. lording it over his mor- 
tality. Or perhaps I had the artistic feeling that 
death should have been received on the scene with 
Shakespearean emotions and the gestures of drama 
— not told to sit down a minute and wait, like a 
needy visitor, till P. Q. had finished with more im- 
portant matters. I began to be afraid that even 

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Bob's iridescent tragedy might get itself pricked 
and exploded if it came under this old man's un- 
daunted eye. If he could wave death aside and 
keep it sitting, unnoticed by everybody, in the very 
corner of his bedroom, how easily might he not 
order these other dusty skeletons back into their 
cupboards and lock them up. 

I escaped the thought by taking a Victorian 
novel from Bob's bookshelves and getting into a 
world where death and dishonor and contested wills 
and illegitimate children were the essentially im- 
portant materials of life, not public utilities and 
affairs of finance and the business for which old 
P. Q. kept death and repentance waiting. I must 
admit, however, that I fell asleep over the book, 
and I could not have fallen asleep over P. Q. 

I woke to find the room darkening, and Bob had 
not returned. Belowstairs, nothing had been heard 
of him. I phoned his brother's office. No answer. 
The office was closed. I left word with the butler 
not to expect us for dinner, and I sallied out to find 
him. There was no trace of his trail in any of his 
favorite haunts on Broadway. No one had seen him 
there. The butler kept replying over the phone that 
no message had come from him. I began to suspect 
that our plans had crashed. The consequent sinking 
feeling reminded me that I had had no dinner. I 
ate hastily at a quick-lunch counter, and depression 
settled on my center of digestion in a conviction of 
impending disaster. I caught at the final hope that 

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Bob might go to see Angela Quayle, whose musical 
comedy was still resisting heat prostration at the 
Manhattan. I could not get past the doorkeeper. 
I had to write a message to her and send it in. The 
messenger came back with a curt: **Nope. Hasn't 
seen 'm." I wandered back to Broadway and stood 
at a loss on the curb. 

In those days, on the corner of Thirty-fourth 
Street and Broadway, there was a drug store. A 
number of people had gathered in front of it to 
watch a hansom cab, its driver, and its occupant. 
I supposed that they were all enjoying an orthodox 
squabble over the cab fare. I heard laughter, real 
laughter, pleased and gleeful. I stared at them 
dismally. And then I saw a familiar figure back 
out of the cab. And it was Bob. 

As I hurried toward him he climbed the wheel to 
reach the driver, and I supposed he was about to 
pull the man out of his seat. Not so. The cabby 
was grinning and the bystanders were in a roar. 
What was it? What was he doing? I elbowed my 
way into the crowd. He was spraying the man with 
perfume from an atomizer. I could smell it. 

I watched him, dumfounded. He lurched dowoi 
from the wheel, sprayed it, and went forward to the 
horse. He began at the hoof of a hind leg and pro- 
ceeded spraying solemnlj^ up the leg to the flank, 
across the barrel of the body to the shoulder, down 
the foreleg to the hoof, up again to the neck 

By this time, everybody was in hysterics, and 

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such a mob had gathered that I foresaw the arrival 
of the police. I fought my way in to him. 

"Here, Bob,'' I said, "what 're you doing?" 

He looked at me unsteadily. " 'S rodden world," 
he muttered. "Dole like smell." 

He returned to his business of reforming his 
environment with rose water. His audience en- 
couraged him with squeals of delight. 

"The police will be here in a minute." I pleaded. 
"Quit this, for heaven's sake." 
^ He mumbled that the police could go 

"That's all right for you," I said, "but you're 
going to get me into trouble again. It '11 be the 
privileges of Broadway that I'll lose, this time. 
They'll put me in jail." 

It was a lucky allusion to the fracas in the college 
library. He evidently remembered that incident, 
and his flight from it, with shame. " 'S aw right, 
o' man," he said. "No 'fense? Li'l' nice perf'm. 
Whas-matter? " 

"It's not allowed on Broadway," I complained. 
"That's what's the matter. It's against the law. 
They'll arrest us." 

"Lei — less beat it," he said, anxiously. "Whur's 
cab? Y'all packed, o' man?" 

"Here." I took the atomizer from him and 
helped him to the step of the hansom. He got in 
with superhuman difficulty. I said to the cabby, 
"Drive us around Central Park for a few hours." 

He winked and flourished his whip. "Now then, 

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PETER QUALE 



my Christian fr'en's," he called, jerking up his 
horse, *'stan' back off this here flower bed. Giddap, 
honey-bunch, er the bees '11 get yah!" 

8 

We left the laughter behind us. We did not leave 
the perfume. Bob had evidently sprayed himself 
and the interior of the cab liberally before I arrived. 
And that endless drive sticks in my memory as a 
sickeningly sweet stench and a maddening inco- 
herence of befuddled babble and an anxiety that 
sat on my chest like a bad dream. What had 
happened.? 

It was impossible to make out. All I could gather 
was Bob's philosophic opinion that the world was 
vile and that his brother John was one of its centers 
of corruption. "Rodden," he kept saying. *' Mind's 
rodden. Money's rodden." And every now and 
then he would giggle and say something that 
sounded like "Thinks I'm crazy." Outside of that 
he was only interested in finding the next sa- 
loon, and we were designedly unable to come on 
one in Central Park. The interminable procession 
of drive lights and tree trunks tired him out. "Los' 
T a fores'," he complained, wearily. "LiT babes 
T a wood." He began to weep. He fell asleep 
against my shoulder. 

We drove round and round till midnight. 

I had intended to keep him in the cab until he 

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sobered, but I had not too much money in my 
pockets, and when I could find none in his I had to 
direct the driver to take us home. There was no 
possibihty of disputing the fare. I gave the cabby 
all the money that I had in the world, and he took 
it, sniffingly, as a poor thing, but his own. 

Bob had wakened in a solemn stupor, but with 
some realization of where he was, and he mounted 
the steps to the door gravely, but in a heavy sea. 
The butler had waited up for him with a message 
that his father wanted to see him as soon as he came 
in. He waved the man aside, intent on the absorb- 
ing uncertainties of his locomotion. We guided him 
upstairs to his rooms. Fortunately, the steps were 
so padded that we might all have rolled down the 
two flights together and made no more noise than 
a galumping cat. We got him into his sitting room, 
but he planted himself in an armchair there and 
refused to go any farther. 

"His father can't see him in this state," I said. 

The butler stood over him, distressed, with a nose 
that judged and condemned him. The perfume was 
vulgar and without shame, even before a butler. 
He opened a window and left us to air. 

Bob fell asleep again. I sat down to smoke, like 
a man at the end of a hard day, and then the butler 
returned with word that old P. Q. wanted to see me. 

This was as unexpected as if I had been suddenly 
called on to come out from behind the scenery of a 
stage play and take a part before the audience. 

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*'Me?'' I said. "What does he want to see me 
for?" 

The butler did not trouble himself to reply. He 
regarded Bob with pained disapproval. 

I asked, weakly, "Where is he?" 

He said, "I'll take you to him." 

He led me downstairs, and across the hall to 
P. Q.'s deserted reception room, and upstairs again 
to a slatted summer door that looked like an inside 
shutter. He turned the knob noiselessly and said, 
"Go in." I entered in darkness. 

I had made up my mind to say that I knew 
nothing, that I had had no part in the affair, that 
I had only just arrived in town. And with this 
determined, I had foreseen myself, in a conspicu- 
ously lighted moment, making a discreet, if awk- 
ward, bow to the tragedy and backing out. The 
darkness upset my rehearsal. It was some time 
before I made out that I was in a dimly lighted 
room with a large screen in front of me. 

When I came around the screen I saw the bedside 
lamp, the white pillows, and, upturned among them, 
P. Q.'s sharp nose illuminated. He was lying on his 
back, under a sheet and a blanket, motionless. The 
rest of the room was a cave of darkness in which 
there shone, dimly, mirrors and mahogany and the 
silver things on a dresser top. The bed was an 
old-fashioned edifice of ornate carving. 

I came slowly toward the light. He said some- 
thing to some one, without moving; and a nurse 

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whom I had not noticed rose from the far side of the 
bed, and came around the foot of it, and passed me 
silently on her way out. I drew near enough to see 
that he was looking at the ceiling thoughtfully. 
He did not speak. 

I asked, at last, "You sent for me?" 

He closed his eyes slowly and opened them, as one 
nods assent. I waited. 

I supposed that he must be very weak. I was the 
more surprised when his voice came low, but strong 
and even rancorous: 

"What's the matter with that boy? Why is he 
drinking?" 

He did not look at me. His gaze had not left the 
ceiling. I said: "I don't know. He seems terribly 
upset?" 

He asked at once, "What's he upset about?' 

I was about to answer, "I don't know, " when his 
eyes rolled around to me, as sharp as an old shaggy 
hound's and the light glittered on them piercingly, 
and I looked away, intimidated, like a schoolboy. 
When I looked back at him again he was studying 
the ceiling as before. 

He said, "He's been telling you that story about 
me, has he? " 

I cleared my throat unsuccessfully. I could not 
get my voice to come. 

"Has he gone crazy?" 

That startled me. He asked it seriously. 

"Crazy?" I said. "No!" And then I under- 

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i» 



PETER QUALE 



stood Bob's giggle ("Thinks I'm crazy"), and I 
guessed that John Quale had dug the whole story- 
out of Bob and reported it to his father as an 
evidence of insanity. Even so, I was not prepared 
for the next question. 

Without any change of tone, he asked, "Has he 
told you he's not my son?" 

I could not answer. I could only stare at him. 
I could not decide whether he knew that Bob was 
not his son or knew that he was. He did not move 
an eyelash. And he was otherwise so still that it 
seemed as if his head were the only part of him that 
was alive. I could not even see any stir of breathing. 

He said, quietly: "Answer me. I haven't time to 
wait." 

And I got the feeling that he was lying there, 
looking at death on the ceiling and conserving every 
heartbeat and cautiously drawing little breaths and 
making no smallest unnecessary movement that 
might be a strain; and I answered, hastily, "Yes." 

"Where did he get that idea.?" 

"He's had it a long time — ever since^he was a 
child." 

His face changed. He blinked several times as 
if something had been suddenly made clear to him. 
"Is he sober enough to understand, if I talk to 
him.?" 

I shook my head. "I don't think so. He will 
be, by morning." 

"I can't wait." He indicated the door with a 

15 [ 219 ] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

glance. "If he can't come, get his mother. Send 
in that nurse." 

I hurried out, seriously excited, and in telling the 
butler to call Mrs. Quale I must have given him the 
impression that P. Q. was dying. I startled Bob 
into a bleary wakefulness, shaking him and prodding 
him with panicky insistence. "Wake up! Wake 
up! Bob! Pull yourself together. Bob! Listen! 
Your father wants to see you. Come on. You've 
got to go. Your brother's told him everything. 
You've got to see him. Pull yourself together." 

He frowned with the effort to understand. 
"What? What's the matter? Is he ?" 

"Yes," I said, "he is. Hurry up. He wants to 
see you. He wants to tell you. You've made a 
mistake." 

"Mistake?" His bloodshot eyes focused on me 
dizzily. 

"Yes." I forced him to his feet. "About Angela 
— about everything. He can explain it. He's 
waiting for you. Come on. Get that smelly coat 
off. Get into a dressing gown. Here!" 

I suppose it was my tone that did it. I was really 
afraid that the old man might die before we got 
back to him, and I was as frantic as if the house 
were afire. Bob made a desperate effort to com- 
prehend, to obey, to grasp what was going on, to 
clear his mind for action. He put his hand to his 
forehead, his face pale and wet with the strain of 
his mental struggle. I pulled off his coat and thrust 

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PETER QUALE 



him into his dressing gown. I hurried him to the 
bathroom and attacked him with a sponge of cold 
water, and straightened his necktie, and tried to 
rectify his tousled look of young profligacy. I suc- 
ceeded in gettmg his brain steadied somewhat, but 
he staggered when he walked, and I had to help 
him to his father's room and lead him into it, 
holding him by the elbow. 

His mother was already there, weeping helplessly 
at the bedside. P. Q. was saying: "You knew I'd 
have to die sometime, didn't you.^^ Don't make it 
any harder for me." 

He moved his head to see us. "Come here," he 
ordered. "Both of you." 

I brought Bob to the light, looking down on the 
floor guiltily. There was a pause. I felt Bob 
stiffen, confronting his father's scrutiny, and I 
heard him breathing hard. 

P. Q. said: "This story about my father and me 
is all damn foolishness. I didn't run away from 
home. He took me, when I wasn't more than five 
years old. And he worked in Dublin for four years 
and earned the money to come to America with. 
He was a tailor. For some God-forsaken reason 
I've been ashamed to admit I had a tailor for a 
father — a woman's job, anyway. That's why I never 
spoke of him. But I didn't remember my mother, 
and I didn't know I had a sister, and I didn't even 
know that I hadn't been born in Ireland. The 
story that I stole anybody's money is a damn lie!" 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

I heard Mrs. Quale murmur, ** Peter!" protest- 
ingly. 

"Well," he grumbled, "that's what it is! Now, 
what's this nonsense about your not being my son? " 

"Peter!" 

I took one look at Mrs. Quale and saw the amazed 
indignation of tearful innocence staring in her face. 
I muttered, "Beg your par — ■'' and left Bob sway- 
ing, and fled. 

9 

As I consider Bob's whole romance, now, I 
realize that I should have suspected the motivation 
of his characters from the first — because it was 
conscious motivation, and if life teaches us anything, 
it teaches us that human motives are always almost 
unconsciovis and self-disguised. That was the very 
point on which fiction had misled me. And in my 
fiction-fed stupidity, I had helped to mislead Bob. 

P. Q.'s lifelong pursuit of security was not the 
indication of any moral guilt. It was the uncon- 
scious result of being thrown on the world a mere 
child, unprotected. He had made his own way as 
a youth, without friends and affection; and when 
he arrived where friends and affection were his for 
the asking, he had not the faculty of asking for 
them. His lack of education was the source of that 
unconscious feeling of inferiority which expressed 
itself in defensive insolence and aggressive domina- 
tion. He had missed all the socializing influences 

[222] 



PETER QUALE 



of school-yard companionship, and his philosophy 
of life was "You be damned." He had been given 
no social feeling for public service, and he saw his 
public properties as all his own. He had never been 
taught the rules of the civilized game of community 
life, and he would steal men from the checkerboard 
in order to win. He had to win. It was the neces- 
sity of his unsocialized ego, of his sense of hidden 
inferiority, of his constant need to defeat his 
opponent and overcome his own fear. 

I should have known it. And I should have 
known that in a divided family, such as the Quales, 
Bob's delusion that he was not his father's son 
would almost inevitably arise out of his champion- 
ing his mother and ranging himself on her side 
against his father. I should not have needed Bob's 
broken explanations when he returned to his room 
and sank into a chair and took his head in his hands 
and began to sob that he had been a fool, that he 
had misjudged his father, that he had always been 
secretly "proud of the old man" and really fond of 
him. "I've — I've always been his favorite," he 
wept. "And I knew it. But I — I wouldn't admit 
it to myself. I fought him. I tried to hate him. 
He knew! He knew all along. He said to me, 
* That's why you'd never let me win at checkers, 
eh.^' And he tried to smile. God!" He wept, 
heartbroken. "What a fool I've been!" 

"But, Bob!" I said. "You told me you'd heard 
your mother " 

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"Oh that was all damn nonsense !" He looked up 
with a tear-drenched, contorted face. "She was 
unhappy about something. They'd quarreled. 
And she meant that I wasn't like the other boys 
and wasn't like him. And she said, 'Thank Heaven, 
he's not a Quale' — or something like that. And I 
hated him because he'd made her cry. And I didn't 
want to be his son. And I got the fool idea — " 
He gasped and shook his head, unable to go on. 

When he caught his breath again he groaned: 
"The poor old geezer, he tried to apologize to us 
both — to explain that he'd been a failure with us 
because he'd always been kind of dumb and — and 
busy — and piled up with things he had to do — things 
that interested him more than they ought to. 
Gee! It tore the guts out of me to listen to him." 

He got blindly to his feet and made his way blun- 
deringly to the bathroom and had his cry out there 
under the pretense of washing his face. When he 
came back he was swollen-eyed and disfigured with 
weeping, but the worst was over. "He's got his 
nerve with him," he said. "He knows every heart- 
beat's likely to be his last, and it worries him about 
as much as I'd be if I was waiting for the dentist. 
He's as sore as boils about John. The big mutton- 
head tried to make him believe I ought to be sent 
to the lunatic asylum. He thinks the old man's 
going to leave him in charge of the estate. I'll bet 
he's not. John's bug about the money and the 
position it '11 give him. So's Paul. Paul thinks 

[224] 



PETER QUALE 



that if he only had money enough he could make 
everybody be good and go to church. John thinks 
he's going to make them all work and be efficient — 
going to run the country " 

(And, as a matter of fact. Bob proved to be right. 
P. Q. left his estate in the hands of a trust company 
to be administered until his youngest grandchild 
should be of age. Characteristic !) 

We talked and talked until daylight began to 
come in the window that the butler had opened on 
us. And it was the last talk of the sort that we had 
together. When I woke late next day. Bob was 
already in his father's room. He came to lunch 
in a subdued glow of happiness, and his mother and 
he carried on a secret interchange of meaningful 
smiles, no matter what we talked about. He was 
like a boy in love. And he seemed to have for- 
gotten Angela. 

"We're going to rig up the checkerboard to- 
night," he said, "and try to play a game. The 
nurse '11 make the moves for him, so he'll not have 
to raise a finger if he doesn't want to." 

I was glad enough to see him happy. And Mrs. 
Quale tried to conceal from me the reproachful 
thought that I had deceived her and encouraged 
Bob in his almost tragical delusion. But it was 
obvious that they both knew he did not "need" 
me any more; and after a lonely evening spent in 
looking for amusement, while Bob entertained his 
dad, I pretended that a letter from home was an 

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urgent summons to return, and they let me go with 
polite regrets. On the train I realized that it was 
the end of our companionship; that Bob would 
never be able to forgive me for sharing his ridiculous 
mistake with him. And he never did. 

According to the newspapers, P. Q. died of an 
attack of rheumatism that had reached his heart. 
The editorials and the obituaries all described him 
as a rare and original character. I agreed with them 
at the time, but I am not so sure, now, that he was 
not the commonest type of successful American. 

E. H. Reede, the neurologist, has written: 

Adler introduced a revolutionary concept into the 
study of psychic mechanisms by showing that the per- 
ception of inferiority, insecurity or danger, stimulates in 
the subconscious mind a mobilization of psychic dexter- 
ities which results in that super-psychism recognized as 
genius. In America, the insecurity that resides in Puritan 
repression was confronted by the new-world menace of 
pioneer perils; and insecurity triumphed over menace 
only by virtue of a concentrated intellectual cunning. 
That has produced the one unique American type. It is 
the archetype of our great frontiersmen, our successful 
politicians, and our predatory business men who stalk 
and ambush their competitors. 

And, at any rate, it is certainly the type of Peter 
Quale. 



VI. DR. ADRIAN HALE HALLMUTH 



YOU have never heard of him. Naturally. 
He was one of the most valuable citizens of our 
day. He saved innumerable lives. He taught 
others how to save more innumerable lives. But, 
our civilization being what it is, he could live in 
distinguished obscurity for twenty years, in New 
York City itself, within hailing distance of all the 
newspaper presses and publicity agents and noto- 
riety factories of the metroplis, and you would never 
hear of him. 

I never heard of him, myself, until Doctor Ward 
spoke of him to me — Dr. Lucius Freeman Ward. 

"Hallmuth was the best surgeon that America 
has turned out," Doctor Ward said. "I've seen 
students come out of his clinics almost with tears 
in their eyes — tears of admiration and a sort of 
despair — like young pianists from a Paderewski 
concert. He worked as if he were clairvoyant, as 
if he had eyes in the blade of his knife. And when he 
came to one of those abdominal operations where 
you have to depend on your fingers to tell you what 
you can't see — and you're wearing rubber gloves — 
he had a sixth sense. I've never seen anything 
like it. Never." 

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I believe it was this suggestion of clairvoyance 
that really interested me. Occult powers in a sur- 
geon! It was like being told that the Stock Ex- 
change at its noisiest hour was haunted. 

I asked for evidence and instances; and, of 
course, it began to appear that Doctor Hallmuth's 
magic was just surgical legerdemain. He had de- 
voted himself to his profession with such singleness 
of determination that he had developed, as it were, 
special sense organs in his hands. He could shut 
his eyes, spread his fingers, and tell you to the 
sixty-fourth of an inch how far his finger tips were 
apart. He could separate his hands, in the same 
way, and give the exact distance between his fore- 
fingers, blindfold. "He had a grip like a pipe 
wrench," Doctor Ward said. "He could pull a cork 
with his second and third fingers. They closed on it 
like a pair of pliers. He could take hold of your 
wrist, that way, and fairly bruise it. They weren't 
fingers; they were steel calipers." The cords in the 
backs of his hands played freely back and forth over 
the knuckles, and he could expand and contract the 
width of the hand as if the bones in it were the 
ribs of a fan. "He wasn't altogether born that 
way," Ward explained. "He had purposely ac- 
quired it, like a contortionist, as part of his 
training." 

Ward had known him from boyhood. They had 
both been born in the New England town of 
Primpton, Massachusetts, but they came of fam- 

[ 228 ] 



DR. ADRIAN HALE HALLMUTH 

ilies separated by such a distance in the social 
scale that it was not until they arrived in the same 
class at college that they became intimate. Ward 
had intended to study law. Hallmuth persuaded 
him to go into medicine. "It was like a religious 
enthusiasm with him," Ward said. "He converted 
me. There's no other word for it. And that was 
one of the things that puzzled me about Hallmuth 
until quite lately — what had given him this fanat- 
ical feeling about medicine?" 

Hallmuth's father owned the textile mills at 
Primpton, and Hallmuth, as the eldest son, should 
have succeeded him in the business. The grand- 
father had been an immigrant weaver who married 
a Massachusetts girl; the father married one of 
the New England Hales; there had never been a 
doctor anywhere in the immediate family. 

"You'd have expected Hallmuth to be a parson, 
if anything," Ward said. "The old people were as 
devout as Jonathan Edwards. They had a fine 
old religious prejudice against science as atheistic, 
and he had a fight for it before they let him go to 
the medical school. How do you suppose he beat 
them.^ Well, he persuaded them that he had 'a call' 
to medicine — like a minister's call. And he had. 
I found out, just lately, how the call came. It's one 
of the most curious things I ever ran across." 

"Tell me about it," I said. 

He did not respond at once. He sat sunken in 
his armchair, pinching his chin between thumb and 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

forefinger, and looking through me thoughtfully, 
with one eyebrow higher than the other and his eyes 
not focused. It gave him a melancholy expression. 

He had just heard that Hallmuth, in charge of a 
field-hospital unit, had died from exposure in the 
Serbian retreat over the mountains of Montenegro, 
somewhere between Fetch and Scutari, in December, 
1915. Or, rather, he had just had a confirmation of 
the cable news of Hallmuth's death, in a letter from 
his assistant, a Doctor Rogers. It was this letter 
that had moved Ward to speak of Hallmuth to me. 

"Tell you about it?" he said, at last. "I don't 
know how to tell you about it. It's too long a story. 
It's the story of Hallmuth's whole life." 

He thought it over, in a sort of mute wonder. 

"The Greeks would have called it Fate," he said. 
"And it shows what this thing is sometimes — the 
thing that we call Fate." 

He nodded to himself. 

"Well," he concluded, "I'll tell you the parts 
that are more or less significant." 

He began to tell me about the time when Hall- 
muth and he had been internes together at the old 
St. Luke's; and his reminiscences, after the manner 
of such, were concerned more with riotous doings 
out of hours than with duties in the hospital. Hall- 
muth had two enviable qualifications for leader- 

[230] 



DR. ADRIAN HALE HALLMUTH 

ship in their young medical convivialities : he could 
drink as much beer as a German student, and he 
played the piano like a rhythmical baboon. 

**He'd spent a year abroad," Ward explained, 
"chiefly in Vienna. He came back with a prej- 
udice against the Germans — due to their operating 
on charity patients without giving them anaes- 
thetics, as far as I could make out — and another 
prejudice against their music. He called it melodic 
suicide, tonal pessimism. He would never play 
anything but dances and ragtime. He said he had 
taken up the piano to develop his hands. I don't 
believe that. He had a gift for music, if he had 
cared to follow it, but he wouldn't. He wouldn't 
surrender to his emotions. He never went to con- 
certs or operas. If an orchestra started anything 
at all moving, he'd get out." 

The gang to which they belonged had found a 
little Hungarian restaurant where they could get 
table dliote dinners cheap and have the freedom of 
a good piano. It was the resort of another clique, 
also, a group from the underworld; and among 
these were two v\^ho became involved with Hallmuth. 

One was a thin-lipped young crook whom they 
nicknamed "the Jackdaw" because of his color and 
his sinister air; and the other was the Jackdaw's 
"skirt," a silent and adoring child of the streets, 
so blond and chalk-faced that they called her "Angel 
Mary." They did not know the real name of either. 

"We'd noticed them together several times at a 

[2311 



so:me distinguished a:merican5 

table in the back of the joint," Ward said, "and for 
some reason Hallmuth took a scunner to the Jack- 
daw on sight." 

He had very sleek and glossy black hair, and a 
bony nose, and a roimd unwmkhig eye that looked 
at you sideways like a rooster's. The girl used to 
sit and wait for him, without eating; and she would 
give him a searching, frightened glance as he entered, 
to see what his mood was. If he came in with his 
hat on the side of his head, swmging his bamboo 
cane, she brightened as if the sun had risen. They 
sat and talked over their food, with their heads 
together, so that you could never hear what they 
said; and at the end of the meal she paid the check 
and went out cheerfullv and left him to smoke over 
his empty plate, pleased with himseK. 

More often he entered draggmg his stick, his hat 
down on his nose; and he sat without lookmg at her, 
and only spoke to her out of the side of his mouth, 
sourly. Then she would eat her meal as quickly 
as possible and pay the check and slink away as 
dejected as a disappointed child. 

"We knew a lot of policemen, from our ambu- 
lance work," Ward explained. "Hallmuth asked 
them about the Jackdaw, and found out that he 
was one of Chick Allen's cadets. Probably a pick- 
pocket and petty con man, too. The ghl was on the 
streets, helping to support him." 

One night they sat at a table directly behind 
Hallmuth and began their meal quietly, but ended 

[232] 



DR. ADRIAN HALE HALLMUTH 

it with a quarrel about a ruby brooch that the 
Jackdaw wanted to give her and she was afraid to 
take. Hallmuth was listening. The others were 
not. And when the crook, m the midst of a hoarse 
whispered controversy, suddenly slapped her face, 
Hallmuth spun around and struck him an open- 
handed blow on the side of his head that toppled 
him off his chair. He sprang up and tried to rush 
Hallmuth, and Hallmuth knocked him down. 

That started a "free for all." There were several 
of the medical clique in the cafe, and at first they 
had all the best of it; but more of Chick Allen's 
gang kept coming in, with brass knuckles and black- 
jacks, and the students had to defend themselves 
with chairs and carafes and anything else they could 
snatch up. Some one called in the poHce, and that 
saved them. 

** Hallmuth and I were cornered," Ward said, 
"behind a table that we had overturned, beating 
off three or four toughs who were trying to disfigure 
us. And behind us was the girl. When the police 
stopped the fight, Hallmuth saw that she had the 
brooch in her hand — the brooch that she and the 
Jackdaw had quarreled about. She had caught it 
up when the table overturned. Hallmuth said: 
'Here! Don't let them see you ^-ith that,' and he 
snatched it away from her. Then when the cops 
were lining us up, he held it out to the Jackdaw and 
said, * I think this is vours ! ' 

"Of course, a plain clothes man grabbed it at 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

once. He demanded, 'Where did you get that?' 
and Hallmuth explained. 

"The detective took out his handcuffs. *I guess 
this '11 do for you,' he said to the Jackdaw, and 
arrested him for burglary. 

"I forget the details of that part of the business. 
Some one confessed and the Jackdaw went up the 
river for five years. All I remember is our end of 
the affair. The desk sergeant didn't hold Hallmuth 
or me, but he held the girl, and Hallmuth went 
down to court next day and paid her fine. I knew 
this at the time, but I didn't know that he took her 
uptown and got her a place to live and found work 
for her to keep her off the streets. And I didn't 
know that he continued seeing her. 

" Chick Allen's gang were looking for us and we 
had to keep away from their end of the town. That 
broke up our parties for a while. I thought that 
Hallmuth was spending his off hours with a girl 
namfed Helen Kane — Doctor Kane's daughter. You 
remember Kane? He had a fashionable practice — 
Madison Avenue. Helen was a handsome big girl, 
athletic. Hallmuth used to ride with her in the 
Park. I thought he was seeing her whenever he 
went off without me. 

^ "Well, he wasn't. He was having some sort of 
affair with * Angel Mary.' I didn't suspect it even 
when she came looking for me, one night at the 
hospital, in a pouring rain, soaking wet. I wasn't 
there, and she didn't ask for Hallmuth, and she 

[234] 



DR. ADRIAN HALE HALLMUTH 

went away without leaving any message. They 
had had a quarrel — as I learned later — and she was 
trying to find him. He never said a word. 

"Two or three days afterward she came to the 
dispensary for medicine and they turned her into 
the free ward with a bad attack of pneumonia. One 
of the nurses came to me, from her. She didn't 
mind involving me, but she was game about pro- 
tecting Hallmuth. *TelI him I'm here,' she said, 
*but don't tell anyone I know him.' 

*'I told him, but he didn't say anything. He 
used to get into the ward to see her, without letting 
anyone but the nurse know. I was with him there, 
at other times, but Angel Mary didn't give either of 
us away by so much as a look that anyone would 
notice — not even when she was dying. She was a 
game kid, all right. 

"I didn't know what had been going on until 
Hallmuth asked me to see that she wasn't buried in 
Potter's Field, and gave me money for the under- 
taker. Even then I had to guess the truth from the 
change that came over him. He began to be queer. 
He stopped riding in the Park — said the crows there 
gave him *the willies.' And then he dropped Helen 
Kane — said he hated dark women, anyway. And 
then he quit St. Luke's and went back to Vienna. 
And I lost track of him for a long time. 

"It seems he took his holidays in the Balkans 
while he was over there, and he learned to speak 
some of the languages — Serbian, at least. That's 

16 [ 235 ] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

why he volunteered for service with the Serbian 
Relief — that and his feeling about the Germans. 
Well " 

3 

Ward paused, and cleared his throat as if he were 
going on at once, and then fell silent, leaning for- 
ward in his chair and looking at his feet. I sup- 
posed that he had suddenly become aware that he 
was rambling in his narrative and getting nowhere; 
and it had the effect of a flash of thought-transference 
when he looked up at me to ask, "Did you notice the 
significance of all that?" 

"Of all what?" 

"Of all those incidents? The Jackdaw? The 
blond Angel Mary? The crows that gave him the 
willies?" 

I shook my head, finding it empty. 

He smiled. "I didn't either, at the time. I didn't 
even suspect that there was any significance in them 
at all, until just before he sailed for England to 
volunteer for work in the Balkans. He came to 
Washington to visit the British Embassy, and he 
dropped in to call on me." 

Here Ward drifted off into another long digres- 
sion. It seems that when he left St. Luke's he went 
into general practice, and became dissatisfied with 
his inability to cure anything but the simple germ 
diseases, and caught at a new theory of the effect of 
the internal glands on the body as the cause of much 

[236] 



DR. ADRIAN HALE HALLMUTH 

ill health, and made himself a sort of specialist in 
the functions of these glands and their disorders. 
Then he found that the glands were affected by 
emotions to such a degree that in many cases he was 
merely treating, in the glands, the symptoms of a 
disturbance in the patient's mind; and this took 
him into the field of mind cure and psychology. 
By the time that Hallmuth returned from his surgi- 
cal studies abroad. Ward had lost his faith in the 
laiif e as anything but a pruning hook, and Hallmuth 
had arrived where he would open a patient as 
inevitably as a watch repairer opens a watch. He 
perfected a new technic of sacral suspension, and 
brought the operation for appendicitis to the point 
of being as safe as pulling a tooth, and performed 
prodigies of skill in cutting diseased areas from 
essential organs without stopping the watch. To 
Ward, he was merely treating symptoms by remov- 
ing the results of disorders which he did nothing to 
cure. They did not exactly quarrel about it; Ward 
was practicing in Washington, and Hallmuth in 
New York, and they were both too busy to write 
controversial letters; but they exchanged mono- 
graphs on their pet subjects and agreed to differ in 
a silence that was not friendly. So, when Hallmuth 
came to Washington in the spring of 1915, and 
telephoned from his hotel to Ward, Ward accepted 
his invitation to dinner with natural misgivings. 

"We haa a whale of a fight," Ward said. "He'd 
been the big frog in his surgical puddle for fifteen 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

years, and he looked on me as a disciple who had 
gone astray. It took me till midnight to make him 
feel that he wasn't divine intelligence instructing 
an insect. Nobody had dared to argue with him for 
ten years, probably. We had a gory time.'* 

The upshot of it was that Hallmuth came to see 
him on the following day, in his office. 

"He had a challenge for me," Ward said. "He 
wanted to know why the sight of the purple grackle 
in Lafayette Park, that morning, had given him 
such a depression that instead of going on to the 
British Embassy he turned back to his hotel and 
went to bed. If there was anything in my theories 
about emotions and their origins, where did this 
emotion come from?" 

In reply. Ward started to "dig," as he put it. 
When had Hallmuth first felt this depression at the 
sight of a black bird.^^ 

He had always felt it. For years, if he saw a 
crow, on his way to an operation, he couldn't help 
but feel that it meant bad luck. 

Yes.f^ And before that? 

Well, he remembered meeting a girl at the 
Metropolitan Museum of Art and having a fit of 
the blues when he saw a painting of some battle 
scene in which vultures or some other black birds 
were settling on the dead. 

"I didn't ask him whether this girl was Helen 
Kane," Ward said, "and I didn't remind him that 
he had given up riding in the Park because the 

[238] 



DR. ADRIAN HALE HALLMUTH 

crows gave him the 'willies.' And I didn't recall to 
him that he had dropped her because he disliked 
'dark women,' and that he had hated the Jackdaw 
on sight and got himself into that mess with Angel 
Mary as a result — and all the rest of it. I was afraid 
that he'd blow up and accuse me of being crazy on 
my own dope. I said : 'This thing probably traces 
back to your early childhood. Do you remember 
any crows or blackbirds at home?' " 

He replied that there were always crows in the 
pines on one side of the house, and they always 
depressed him. "The house was a gloomy old hole, 
anyway," he said. "I was always glad when my 
holidays were over and I could get back to school. 
There was too much prayer and Puritanism at home." 

Ward asked: "Had it any other depressing 
associations.^ Had anybody died there — anyone 
that you were very fond of.^" 

"Yes," Hallmuth said, "a cousin, when I was 
about seven — a little girl, an orphan. My parents 
had all but adopted her." 

"Was she dark or fair.^" Ward asked. 

"She had long yellow curls," Hallmuth said. 
"I remember that. And I remember that when 
she took sick they wouldn't let me into the room 
to see her. It was diphtheria, I suppose. And when 
they were all asleep one night I sneaked downstairs 
and got into bed with her." He laughed contemp- 
tuously. "I remember the row they raised when 
they found us asleep together in the morning." 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

"They were afraid you'd get the diphtheria?" 
Ward asked. 

"It wasn't only that. They had nice clean 
Puritan minds, and poor little Fanny was three or 
four years older than I was — 'old enough to know 
better,' as they said — and they treated the whole 
incident as a nasty scandal. Really! There had 
been something the matter about her mother. I 
never knew what. But they saw *the bad blood' 
coming out in Fanny, and one of my maiden aunts 
was quite relieved when the diphtheria killed her. I 
heard her saymg so — with tears, of course, and sanc- 
timoniously — arguing that it was probably 'all for 
the best' to have her taken away from the sins and 
temptations of this world. Lord ! how I hated her ! " 

Ward had been struck by the parallel between this 
incident and the death of Angel Mary in the hos- 
pital; and with that parallel in his mind, he asked, 
cryptically, "Where did the Jackdaw come in.^^" 

Hallmuth answered: "It wasn't a jackdaw. It 
was a raven." And then he asked, astonished, 
"How did you know.^^" 

"I didn't," Ward evaded him. "Tell me about 
the raven." 

It was a stuffed bird, under a glass bell, on the 
mantelpiece of the room in which Fanny was laid 
out for burial. Hallmuth was taken in there by the 
family to join in funeral prayers; and he could not 
bear to look at Fanny's face; and he would not look 
at any of the family because he felt that they were 

[240] 



DR. ADRIAN HALE HALLMUTH 

all, like his aunt, glad that she had died; so he stared 
sullenly at the bright-eyed bird on the mantelshelf, 
with its head cocked on one side like some pert imp 
of Satan. "It looked like my aunt in her black 
dress," Hallmuth said. "And it looked like the 
undertaker. And all the mourners came trooping 
around like black birds. And I ran away and hid in 
the orchard and wouldn't go to the funeral. And I 
hated them all, and I hated the house, and I hated 
the crows " 



Ward, relating it, settled back in his chair and 
spread his hands as one says, "And there you are!" 

"But do you mean to say " I began. 

"I mean to say," he interrupted, "that because of 
those incidents in his childhood, the black bird 
became associated with death in Hallmuth's mind 
to such a degree, and so unconsciously^ that when- 
ever he saw a crow or a purple grackle it gave him a 
depression, and a fear, and a sense of failure that 
he couldn't fight against. Any black bird was a 
symbol of death to his instinctive emotions. It 
was this fear and hatred of death that made him a 
doctor. His ambition to study medicine began al- 
most immediately after his cousin died. That was 
where 'the call' came from. He wanted to fight 
death as a divinity student wants to fight sin. It 
was a real call. And it made him a great surgeon. 
But it also set his limitations as a physician. He 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

had to have tangible causes and "^results — lience 
surgery. With the knife, you know pretty well what 
you want to do, and you have only to acquire the 
necessary skill in order to do it, hence Hallmuth's 
drive to develop his hands. And I'm willing to bet 
it was his fear of death and of melancholy thoughts 
of death that made him hate any kind of sad music. 
And I'm not ashamed to say that I believe some of 
his hatred of Germany probably came of that two- 
headed black bird, the imperial eagle, or whatever 
it is. And when war broke out he saw it as the 
triumph of death and he gave up everything to fling 
himself into it.'* 

"Did you tell him so?" 

*'I did not," Ward said, grimly. "It would have 
sounded as fantastic to him as it does to you. You 
people can't stand to have the childishness of your 
apparently intelligent mental processes exposed to 
you. I simply connected his blackbird depression 
with his first knowledge of death, and let it go at 
that. I'm sorry, now, that I didn't tell him the 
whole truth. I might have saved him." 

"Saved him how-f^" 

"Saved him from being killed by a blackbird." 



I must have shown my amused incredulity. Ward 
got up and took a letter from the clutter of papers 
on his desk, and sat down with it, turning the pages. 

[£42] 



DR. ADRIAN HALE HALLMUTH 

"The cable from London," he said, "reporting 
Hallmuth's death, announced that his hospital unit 
had arrived at Brindisi without him, and was held 
there in quarantine. I cabled to Rogers, his as- 
sistant, asking for confirmation. I got this letter 
from him after he reached Paris. Listen, now: — " 

He began about page three. " 'Hallmuth showed 
no signs of strain up to the night we left Kraguye- 
vatz. We were retreating before the Germans under 
Mackensen, with the Austrians off to our left, I 
think, and the Bulgarians pressing in from the other 
flank to cut us off. Our orders were to get ourselves 
and our ambulances to Prishtina by way of '" 

He waved it aside. "I can't pronounce those 
names. It's immaterial." 

"*We understood that at Prishtina we might 
expect to meet the Allied forces on their way north 
to block the Bulgars. The road from Kraguyevatz 
to Prishtina took us down the entire Serbian line 
that faced the Bulgars, and we had the German guns 
behind us — where our division was fighting rear- 
guard actions — and the Bulgarian guns coming in 
nearer and nearer from the east. At first we had 
plenty of work — lots of wounded — wherever we h 
pitched our hospital tents, but as the retreat became 
more of a rout the day's wounded could not be 
gathered up for us. They had to be left where they 
fell. It was this, I think, that first depressed Hall- 
muth. He was always miserable when he had no 
work to do. 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

"'The weather was cold. Late in October. And 
rainy. The roads were full of refugees — mostly 
women and children, some of them mere tots — 
carrying bundles, driving their sheep and goats 
through the rain and mud, and these were all mixed 
up with army convoys and retreating troops. Deso- 
late country. The villages through which we passed 
had all been evacuated. There was, of course, no 
food to be bought anywhere. We were all right. 
We had our supplies. But these women and 
children! We could see them sleeping in the bare 
fields at night, around little camp fires, without 
shelter, in the rain, hundreds of them. Whenever 
we halted, Hallmuth used to go and try to talk to 
them. Then, one day, he asked the major how 
many of them would starve to death. This was 
just before we got to Prishtina and we knew that 
every inch of Serbia was lost. The major said that, 
all told, he thought about half a million refugees 
would perish. After that Hallmuth never looked 
at them. 

"*Just outside of Prishtina he seemed to be all 
in. We had come through a gorge in the mountains, 
riding day and night, except when a jam of traffic 
held us up. We were on ponies. Very cold. I had 
on three pairs of heavy socks, and boots and over- 
shoes, but even so I had to wrap my feet and my 
stirrups in straw and bandages. We came to a 
high plateau, with mountains on all sides, snow, 
and a moon shining. Everywhere dead horses, 

[244] 



DR. ADRIAN HALE HALLMUTH 

dead oxen. The retreat had been going on ahead 
of us for days. 

"*This plateau, the major said, was a famous 
battlefield. I remember he waved his hand at it — 
he wore gray-woolen socks over his gloves — and he 
turned to Hallmuth to explain in a shout that five 
hundred years ago the Serbs were defeated there 
by the Turks, at the battle of Kossovo Polye, 
which means "the field of blackbirds." Hallmuth 
had been in a sort of daze. All of a sudden he looked 
up at the sky as if he saw an airplane swooping 
down on him, and he began to kick his heels into his 
horse and beat it with his fists and yell at it. It 
broke into a staggering gallop and then stumbled 
and fell. He wasn't hurt. He was thrown clear of 
the horse and lay unconscious. I thought, at the 
time, that he had been knocked senseless by the 
fall. I found that he had only fainted. It scared 
me a good deal. ' " 

Ward looked up at me significantly, but made 
no comment, and went on with the letter. 

"'At Prishtma — ' No, we can skip that. He says 
the Allies didn't arrive, and instead of going on south 
toward Salonika, they were ordered to turn west to 
Fetch, at the foot of the mountains of Montenegro. 

"*We knew this meant the annihilation of Serbia. 
Two hundred thousand men, with all their convoys, 
and Heaven knows how many hundred thousand 
refugees with all their carts and cattle, had to squeeze 
through ' 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

"Yes. Well. Let's see. *0f course, there weren't 
roads enough. We had to take to the fields, follow- 
ing any sort of track, through swamp and bush — 
scrub oak — and bowlders. The motor ambulance 
could just make it and no more. It was slow going, 
pulling them out of mudholes with ox teams, cutting 
brush to get them across bogs, riding ahead to find 
tracks they could travel on, and coming back to 
lead them. It began to be evident that we'd have 
to abandon them if we were to get away at all. 
Hallmuth wouldn't hear of it. It meant losing all 
our hospital equipment. He worked like mad to 
save them. 

"'Then, at Fetch, the P. M. O. of the division 
told us it was impossible to get farther with cars. 
We couldn't even make it with carts, he said. We'd 
have to pack what we could on the horses, and leave 
the rest. This was really a blow to Hallmuth. He 
got a lot of the instruments out of their cases and 
put them in his rug bag, but, of course, he couldn't 
take them all. We hadn't pack saddles enough and 
we needed all the available room for food. 

"*We had to leave our tents, beds, clothes, 
cooking dishes, the whole field kitchen, all our 
hospital equipment — everything but food and 
blankets and the clothes we could put on. Hallmuth 
seemed to regret nothing but the surgical things. 
He turned away from them without a word, and 
as a matter of fact he spoke very little from that 
time on. We were getting away from the sound of 

[246] 



DR. ADRIAN HALE HALLMUTH 

German guns, but he kept watching the sky for 
airplanes ' " 

Ward looked up at me. I had nothing to say. 
He went on: 

"'He kept watching the sky for airplanes — 
though, as a matter of fact, we saw none until we 
were bombed by them after we were safe in Medua 
on the other side of the mountains, and Hallmuth 
was no longer with us by then. He died between 
Fetch and Roshai, if I remember. It's all as con- 
fused as a nightmare to me. I didn't make any 
entries in my diary after we left Fetch. Even if I 
hadn't been too tired at any time to think of it, my 
fingers were always too stiff with cold to hold a 
pencil. You see, we weren't going through the 
mountains by the passes. Those were so full of 
refugees that it was impossible to get through them. 
We followed trails right over the ranges, through 
the woods, wading the streams, and lying down to 
sleep wherever the nights overtook us, often without 
fires, even, and sleeping with our feet against bowl- 
ders so we wouldn't slide down the mountain side 
and roll over a precipice. When we had wood we 
melted snow for water, made tea, and ate some of 
our tinned stuff, but we often had nothing for our 
ponies except beech leaves that we dug out from 
under the snow, and there were days when we were 
all so weak with exhaustion that I don't know how 
we ever got through. 

"*We were in no danger of losing our way. 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Hundreds of straggling soldiers and thousands of 
peasants were toiling along before and behind us. 
And the dead lay all along the track. Worse than 
the dead were the dymg — men and women and 
children, sometimes in groups, sometimes a man 
or a woman alone, too weak to crawl any farther. 
We had to pretend we didn't see them, and hurry 
by. Hallmuth no longer paid any attention to them. 
He was terribly despondent about the war — about 
everything. I spoke to him about the awful loss of 
life, and he said, "All the years that we've been 
fighting to save lives, and they throw away more 
here in an hour! W^hat was the use? Our lives 
have been wasted!" Most of the time we were too 
dazed and tired to talk. 

"'His death happened this way. At dusk on 
the 5th or 6th of December we were climbing 
along the side of a slope with a wood below us, 
and below the wood was a stream bed. We de- 
cided to camp for the night in the dry bed of the 
stream, and the order was given to turn aside and 
drop down through the wood and reassemble in 
the stream bed. It was every man for himself. 
There was from a foot to three feet of snow among 
the trees, and under the snow wore bowlders and 
fallen tree trunks. The branches of the trees were 
low enough to brush you out of the saddle, and 
the ponies slipped and slid down steep places. I 
was thrown twice, and I finished the descent on 
foot, with the pony following me. 

[248] 



DR. ADRIAN HALE HALLMUTH 

"*It was dark before I got to the bottom. Cam- 
eron was standing on a rock — the bed of the stream 
was not dry; it was full of half -frozen mud — and he 
was shouting and blowing his whistle to guide the 
rest of us to him. We all arrived except Hallmuth. 
We started to search for him after a while, but we 
had only oil enough for one of our lamps, and we 
took turns, two or three of us going together in 
shifts. I don't know about the others, but I was so 
tired that I just walked in my sleep. I had to give 
it up and lie down by the camp fire, but I woke at 
daybreak, and when I heard that he had not been 
found I started right out agam. 

'* *The sun was up when I came on him, sitting 
against a bowlder beside his dead pony. It had 
evidently fallen under him, but he had got up and 
walked five or six feet before he sat down. We 
could not find any sign of injury on him. He was 
sittmg hatless, with his hands thrust deep into the 
snow on either side of him, staring ahead of him. 
I came crawling right up a steep place toward him 
without seeing him. I was looking for his tracks, 
and I climbed up over a bowlder and stopped to 
examine the print of a bird's feet in the snow on top 
of the bowlder. I was interested because we had not 
seen any birds large enough to be worth shooting, 
and this was evidently a big one. Then I raised 
my eyes and saw him watching me. I thought by 
his look that I had frightened him. He was staring 
right at me. I said: "What's the matter, Doctor? 

[249] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Did I scare you ? " Then I realized that he was dead. 
He looked as if something had scared him to death. 
He had been dead about twelve hours, I should say. 
Heart failure, Cameron said, due to exhaustion and 
exposure.'" 

Ward laid down the letter. "Well.?>" 



VII. VANCE COPE 



IT was not so much an automobile as a triumphal 
car — bright with the theatrical resplendence of 
a stage super's chain mail — an armored car of pol- 
ished metal, angular, with conspicuous rivet heads 
along the seams of its hood. It did not appear to 
go on wheels, but to float forward, through respect- 
ful space, on a subdued murmur of cosmic power. 
It had suddenly turned the corner of Sunset Boule- 
vard and caught us crossing its path; and it bore 
down on us like a combination of the German army 
and the day of judgment. We stood helpless, petri- 
fied, fascinated, unable to escape. 

Then some miracle happened. It did not seem to 
notice us, but it stopped haughtily, withholding its 
might. We had time to jump back out of its way. 
It proceeded, without effort, without remark, aristo- 
cratically ignoring the fact that it had saved our 
lives. It did not wish to acknowledge any show of 
gratitude from us, possibly. It was above that sort 
of cheap emotionalism. 

So were the Japanese chauffeur and the footman 
in livery who reigned together on its front seat, as 
sacerdotal and aloof as two minor stone gods 
guarding the portals of an Egyptian temple. The 

17 [ 251 ] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

chief divinity was behind them, in the shadows of 
the closed limousine, his soft hat drawn down on his 
eyebrows, staring ahead of him in a Napoleonic 
gloom, pallid, frowning, and yet, it seemed to me, 
self-conscious. He had the look of make-believe 
that you see on the stern mouth of a child who is 
playing soldiers. 

He was borne slowly by, in his imperial ease, and 
Gadkin said : " That's him! That's Cope ! " 

We had been talking of him. Inevitably. We 
were in Los Angeles, and Gadkin was a moving- 
picture actor. You could as easily be in Washington, 
in the old days, and not talk of Theodore Roosevelt 
to a politician. Added to that, I had come to Holly- 
wood to try to write a scenario for Cope, and I was 
much more eager to hear about him and to do him — 
to write him up for a magazine — than to do his 
scenario. I felt that his history — ^his spiritual 
history — and the progress of his mental and moral 
development were truly matters of public concern. 
And I still feel that they are so. 

Or they ought to be so. I suppose the truth is 
that civilization is never able to keep up, mentally, 
with its own growth and change. We devote a 
mediseval amount of attention to the occupants of 
our old official thrones and quite ignore the new 
controlling powers that stand at the royal elbow. 

[252] 



VANCE COPE 



The books on Roosevelt are now filling a memorial 
library, and what the newspapers printed about 
him, in his day, if properly chopped and macerated, 
would overflow all the corn silos in the state of 
Kansas; yet, of the men and women who really 
made the public opinion that created Roosevelt, 
what is there in print? And what of Vance Cope, 
who, in any theatrical season, affects an audience 
as large as the accumulated audiences of Shake- 
speare's three centuries — and inspires as much ani- 
mating emotion in a year as Roosevelt provoked in 
thirty — and forms the practical ideals of more young 
Americans in an afternoon than all the politicians, 
preachers, teachers, and professors of all the parties, 
churches, schools, and colleges from here to Holly- 
wood? 

You know, really, this man has a terrifying power. 
He controls a human Niagara Falls of feeling. It 
is very picturesque and sesthetical to write of him 
and his output in terms of art criticism, but there 
is another aspect to his activity. He is turning 
how many million human power-wheels and pro- 
ducing how many billion volts and amperes of 
moral energy and emotional charge? 

I am not pleading for any moralistic consideration 
of his work. We have had plenty of that — of the 
conventional kind — busy with appearances. In his 
"Samson and Delilah" and again in his "Antony 
and Cleopatra," it was the appearance of the human 
body that startled the world. In " Manon Lescaut " 

[253] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

the bodies were satisfactorily muffled up, but naked 
human passions came into public sight, to the horror 
of the moralists. In "Her Fine Feathers" they 
were scandalized to see that life went on after 
sunset — "night life," they called it, shuddering. 
Engaged in censoring these appearances, they 
missed the true point and moral of all four films, 
which was that woman is always the enemy of man, 
his trap and betrayer, whether she be Delilah, or 
Cleopatra, or Manon destroying her lover, or the 
spendthrift wife in "Her Fine Feathers" bankrupt- 
ing her fond American husband. 

That was a useful poison to be pumping into the 
young American male mind, wasn't it.^^ I thought 
so. And I thought it might be worth while to 
discover why Cope was so full of this antique 
masculine fear of woman. I believed that if I could 
trace the origin of the disease in him, and show that 
it was a disease — that it was a morbid exaggeration 
of a subconscious sex fear as old as the myth about 
Adam and Eve — the information might make it 
more difficult for Cope to spread his infection in the 
cinema theater. 

Gadkin helped me, at once, unwittingly. He had 
some of the information that I needed. He had 
known Cope in early boyhood, in Chicago, where 
Gadkin had been a young actor and Cope an usher, 
after school hours, in the theater in which Gadkin 
played his first speaking part. Gadkin was the 
elder. Cope had sought him out, with the timid 



VANCE COPE 



persistence of a boyish hero worship, and Gadkin 
had patronized him and encouraged him. When 
Gadkin, in the natural course of his ambition, 
moved on to New York, he assisted Cope to follow 
him, got Cope work as a super, taught him some of 
the mysteries of theatrical make-up, found him a 
cheap boarding house to live in, and generally 
showed him the ropes. 

Gadkin told of it with angry accusations of in- 
gratitude, because Cope and he had subsequently 
quarreled. His story consisted more of emotion 
than of biographic fact. He was an artist, not a 
historian. Like an epic poet, he began in the middle 
and pursued his narrative in both directions at once. 
He jeered and laughed and cursed and was contemp- 
tuous. He did not understand Cope at all. Indeed, 
he misunderstood Cope bitterly. But in the midst 
of all his impassioned ignorance about Cope, he had 
several significant clues to an explanation of Cope's 
character — without knowing that he had them. 



Cope's boyhood, for example. It was easy to 
reconstruct some of that from Gadkin's misappre- 
hensions. 

Vance Cope — John Vincent Cope — Vinny Cope, 
in his childhood — was the son of a commercial 
traveler and an actress of a sort. He was born in 
Chicago about 1880, and he lost his legal father in 

[255] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

his infancy, after a matrimonial quarrel which he 
remembered as an angry argument, a violent exit, 
and the entrance of a new dad. He did not like his 
second father, and the relationship did not last long, 
though it apparently lasted long enough for the boy 
to mark himself as an impediment to a mother who 
was inclined to seek sentimental adventures of a 
remunerative issue. He was sickly, and she was 
robustiously indifferent and neglectful of him. He 
thought her beautiful. She did not conceal it from 
him that she found him ridiculously spindling and 
gawky. "At her best," Gadkin said, "I don't 
believe she was ever more than a show girl. She'd 
deserted him before I knew him. Said she was 
going on tour, and never came back." 

She probably resented the fact that her life was 
in danger of being censored — like the plot of a latter- 
day movie — so as to make it worthy of the admira- 
tion of childish innocence. She had no relatives 
to leave him with, so she abandoned him to the 
mercies of a boarding house, where she paid for 
him when she had the money, but left him usually 
penniless. The public schools tried to give him a 
free education, but they did not succeed in giving 
him any appetite for their prescribed information. 
It followed that while he was still nominally at 
school he began to work as a theater usher in the 
evenings and on matinee afternoons. 

It followed, also, that he became a sensitive, 
imaginative, lonely minded boy, physically inade- 

[ 256 1 



VANCE COPE 



quale to life, starved in his affections, afraid of his 
school companions, and carrying himself with an 
offensive trembling pride that was intended to con- 
ceal his fear. On a Sunday, in Chicago, wandering 
around the streets, full of adolescent melancholy, 
he envied the family groups that he saw on their 
way to church; and his envy expressed itself to 
Gadkin as a feeling of superiority to these poor 
human sheep, passing him in flocks, as if bell- 
wethered by a church chime. This attitude of 
contempt, resented by his classmates, brought him 
most of the persecutions from which he suffered in 
school. It was a pose that quite deceived Gadkin. 
Gadkin, I imagine, was flattered by the adulation 
of so haughty a critic of the rest of the world. He 
did not suspect that Cope's criticism, like so much 
of its kind in artists and writers, was the self- 
protective attack — the militarist's "offensive de- 
fensive" — of sensitive weakness. 

And he saw as merely laughable Cope's earliest 
known adventure in love. 

In the theater in which Cope first began to work 
as an usher there was an actress of no great popu- 
larity, old enough to be his mother. He must have 
adored her for some time obscurely, from the back 
of the house, before he began to imitate the homage 
of open admiration in the theater, by bringing 
flowers to the footlights for her. They were ex- 
pensive bouquets of roses, and though they arrived 
only once a week, anonymously, on Saturday nights, 

[257] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED A^IERICANS 

they cost him most of his small weekly salary. The 
third time that he came dowii the aisle, pale, with 
his tribute, she sent her maid to ask him who had 
given him the flowers. There was no card in them, 
and an envious leading man had spread the rumor 
that she was sending flowers to herself. 

Cope was coolly mysterious and uncommunica- 
tive with her maid, and he wa,s summoned to his 
idol's dressing room after the performance; but by 
that time he had his storv readv. A rich romantic 
youth had been giving him the roses with instruc- 
tions not to tell where they came from. No, he 
could not say where this ardent stranger sat; he 
sat in different places at different times. Yes, he 
was there every night, but it was only on Saturday 
nights that he brought roses. No, he couldn't point 
him out to her. He had promised not to. 

He was vague and agitated and, in one respect, 
rather queer; he refused to take a tip from her and 
seemed pained that she should offer it. When she 
pressed it on him he backed out of the room with 
a reproacliful expression of face. 

She must have felt that there was something 
wrong, for she did not speak of the interview to 
anyone. It was her maid who talked, and the 
leading man who investigated. He set the com- 
pany's press agent to watch Cope; and on the fol- 
lowing Saturday night, when Cope arrived with his 
roses under his overcoat, the press agent had seen 
him buy them. Before the curtain rose on the 

[258] 



VANCE COPE 



second act every member of the company on the 
stage had heard the story. None of them believed 
that Cope had been buying the flowers with his own 
money; naturally, they supposed that the actress 
herself had been paying for them. In the final scene 
of the act, just before the curtain fell, the leading 
man whispered to her, "Your flowers are here!" 
The others alarmed her with sly, cynical smiles. 
When Cope started down the aisle with his offering, 
they were all watching for him, and they greeted 
him with titters. 

She pretended not to see him. Cope reached his 
bouquet up to the footlights, trembling, aware that 
she was ignoring him and more horribly aware that 
all the others on the stage were grinning at him. 
He knew that the audience would realize something 
was wrong, and he felt them starmg at his back 
while they applauded. He stood there, painfully 
conspicuous, holding up his foolish bouquet even 
while the curtain fell and rose again. The leading 
man came forward at last, and took the flowers from 
him and offered them to her elaboratelv, but she 
ignored them, bowing to the audience, who had 
begun to laugh without knowing why. The leading 
man gave the roses to the comedian, who mugged 
and simpered over them. The house roared. The 
actress darted a malignant look of fury at Cope. 
He fled up the aisle through what seemed to him 
a din of public ridicule. 

The press agent said something to him at the 

12591 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

back of the house, but Cope was too confused to do 
more than recognize the expression of derision. He 
rushed to get his overcoat and ran from the theater. 
And he never returned. It was in another Chicago 
theater that Gadkin met him and befriended him. 



Gadkin, as I have said, saw this incident as merely 
laughable. He was perhaps blind to its importance, 
because Cope himself spoke of it with laughter when 
he told Gadkin of it, years after the event. But 
Gadkin related Cope's second sentimental adven- 
ture with the same stupid amusement, although, 
in its setting and its result, it paralleled the first so 
exactly that even Gadkin might have divined the 
existence of a predetermining cause, in Cope him- 
self, for both the scenes. 

The second incident happened in New York. 
When Gadkhi arrived there, in the autumn of 1900, 
he got a small part in a play about royalty at the 
old Lyceum Theater, on Fourth Avenue. And 
when Cope followed Gadkin from Chicago, Gad- 
kin's influence with the stage manager of the play 
pushed Cope into a convenient vacancy among 
the court uniforms that adorned the third act. The 
leading woman of that play — as you perhaps re- 
member — was little Janet Nast in the role of the 
Princess Aline; and the play was "Her Royal 
Happiness." You may have forgotten that it was 

[2601 



VANCE COPE 



in the film version of "Her Royal Happiness" that 
Cope subsequently began his career as a movie 
director, with Janet Nast as his star. The coin- 
cidence is not accidental. Neither was the play's 
failure on the stage accidental, nor its later success 
on the screen. All these developments were inherent 
in the incidents that occurred during Cope's one 
night on the Lyceum stage. 

"Her Royal Happiness" had been billed as a 
"romantic comedy," and there was probably no 
intentional deception in the phrase, but the play- 
wright was an Englishman, and he could have had 
no conception of how romantically romantic the 
true American is in his imaginative intercourse with 
kings and queens. Americans get their first idea 
of royalty from childhood's fairy tales; and, through- 
out their lives, in spite of their adult better sense, 
every son of a throne carries for them some of the 
glamour of a fairy prince, and every royal daughter 
is apt to move them to mystical protective dotings. 
Futhermore, the Americans of 1900 had been drink- 
ing deep of the royalistic distillations of Anthony 
Hope and Stanley Weyman and Maurice Hewlett 
and the authors of To Have and To Hold and If I 
Were King and When Knighthood loas in Flower — 
to name only a few of the most potent. For some 
hidden reason — a reason that was connected perhaps 
with a surfeit of commercial success and of devotion 
to McKinley's "full dinner pail" — the production 
of court romances had become a national industry 

[261] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

second only to the manufacture of patent aids to 
indigestion. The output of American humor as an 
antidote to psychic distress was a poor third; even 
Mark Twain had been writing Joan of Arc. 

With such an audience, the English author of 
"Her Royal Happiness" made a fatal mistake when 
he wrote about royalty in a manner that was 
mildly satirical. He drew his king as an amiable 
crowned bonehead who did and said whatever he 
was told to do and say by various polite but de- 
cided public officials. The queen ruled the palace 
as the politicians ruled the kingdom; and the whole 
royal family was disappointingly human and do- 
mestic. The little Princess Aline was somewhat 
more to the popular taste, because she was saved to 
romance by Janet Nast's prettified stage affecta- 
tions and by the inability of any self-respecting 
author of that day to make a young girl human; 
but here again there was a damning flaw. In the 
first act she gave her heart to a secret playmate, 
who was the son of the lodgekeeper or something 
equally low; and in the last act she was compelled 
to betroth herself to Prince Albert of Aquitania, 
and to sacrifice her royal love to her royal duty. 
Gosh! 

The play had been slowly dying of these congeni- 
tal defects for a month or more when Cope came 
into it. His participation was not obtained with 
any hope that he might make a difference. On the 
previous night one of the supers had hung up his 

[262] 



VANCE COPE 



aide-de-camp's uniform in the supers' dressing room 
and announced to the captain that he was through — 
his brother had got him a government job on a mail 
wagon — and by virtue of Gadkin's backing. Cope 
came in to fill the empty clothes. That was all. 

Gadkin brought him to the theater in the after- 
noon, and showed him how to make up, and helped 
him into his costume, and explained to him where 
he was to enter, and picked out the place where he 
was to stand on the stage. There was no difficulty 
about the part; he was one of a dozen supers who 
were to come on the stage together, stand as a court 
chorus for fifteen minutes in a throne-room scene, 
and follow their leader out when the scene was 
ended. And there was no difficulty about his cos- 
tume; it was a becoming uniform of robin's-egg blue 
and it almost fitted him when he inflated his thorax 
so as to take up the wrinkled slack in the white 
plastron that buttoned across his breast like a 
fencer's chest pad. There was some unromantic bag- 
giness about the trousers — and he could not inflate 
his legs — but the supers' mirror did not show him 
below the belt, and Gadkin made no criticisms. 

Gadkin wanted Cope to hear him during the one 
speaking moment that the play allowed him, in the 
second act, so he arranged that Cope should have a 
seat in the back of the house during the first part 
of the performance. It would be well for Cope to 
know what the play was about, anyway; it would 
help him to look his part in the third; and he could 

[263] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

find his way to his dressing room, toward the end 
of the second act, in time to be made up and in his 
place when the curtain rose for the throne-room 
scene. 

These arrangements seemed quite innocent and 
intelligent, and Gadkin did not suspect that there 
was anything dangerous in them until he went to 
the supers' dressing room to see Cope, just before 
the second curtain, and found that Cope had not 
yet arrived. Gadkin was himself in costume, so he 
could not go out front to warn Cope that he must 
hurry. At the last possible minute he bribed the 
call boy to find Cope and bring him through the 
stage door behind one of the first tiers of boxes; but 
the curtain was down a long time before the boy 
returned with Cope, dazed and bewildered-looking, 
and silent under Gadkin's angry remonstrances. 

"He looked doped," Gadkin described it. "I 
almost had to put his clothes on him. I did have to 
button them. There wasn't time to make him up 
properly, and he had to follow the others upstairs 
with his sword belt in his hands. I got it buckled 
on him in the wings just as the curtain rang up, and 
I shoved him into the procession. The stage man- 
ager bawled him out, and so did I, but he didn't 
seem to hear us." 

The throne-room scene was the big emotional 
scene of the play. It began with some impressive 
court pomp that led up to a speech from the throne 
in which the king announced the happy composition 

[264] 



VANCE COPE 



of all his differences with the neighboring kingdom 
of Aquitania. (Aquitania had been threatening war 
for two acts.) A treaty of alliance had now been 
arranged between the two countries and all dis- 
puted territory ceded to his crown. To cement the 
alliance. His Royal Highness the Crown Prince 
Albert Adolf George Charles Rudolf of Aquitania, 
etc., had sought in marriage the hand of Her Royal 
Highness Princess Margaret Ottillia Christina Eliza- 
beth Constantia Helena Aline, etc., etc. His Im- 
perial Majesty was graciously pleased to inform his 
loyal subjects that the Princess Aline had deigned 
to look with favor on the royal prince of Aquitania — • 
or something of that sort. And then little Janet 
Nast cried out, thrillingly, "No!" 

In those days Janet Nast could act. Her young 
imagination had not yet been wholly stifled by the 
growth of self -consciousness that afterward incased 
and hardened on her. She could throw herself into 
her speech of revolt with a high passion, girlish and 
regal and pathetic, her voice breaking even while 
her words were defiant, and her head up, though 
she wept. Ordinarily, she would have carried her 
audience into a storm of applause; they wept and 
palpitated with her, as it was; but the playwright, 
at the top of the excitement, had given the king a 
ridiculously human line; and all the heroic emotions 
of the audience got relief in a shout of laughter. 
The embarrassment of the court was equally laugh- 
able. They were funny in their polite attempts to 

[265] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

suppress their excitement and to escape as incon- 
spicuously as possible from the scene of a royal 
family quarrel. The queen was comic in her 
domestic anger, blaming the henpecked king; and 
when she swept out and left him to discipline his 
offspring, the stage should have been empty for the 
prettily pathetic scene between father and daughter 
that was to be followed by the meeting of the 
princess and her boyish sweetheart, and his renunci- 
ation of her, and all the rest of it. 

The stage should have been empty, I say — ^but 
Cope, in his aide-de-camp's uniform, was standing 
obstinately in his place beside the door at the left. 
He had remained behind when the others of the 
court had abandoned the princess to her fate. The 
queen had seen him from across the stage, but her 
lines had been too quick and angry to allow her to 
change her exit so as to take him off with her. She 
had stormed out through the door right, and then 
run to warn the stage manager. And when the 
king began his scene with his daughter the stage 
manager was audibly cursing Cope through the 
open doorway and pleading with him to come off 
the stage. 

"Cope looked as if he were hypnotized," Gadkin 
said, "and his eyes were full of tears, and he was 
trembling, and you couldn't seem to make him hear 
a thing. He wasn't going to leave the princess to 
be forced into a loveless marriage, and that's all 
there was to it. Funny! It was so funny it nearly 

[266] 



VANCE COPE 



ruined the play. If Charlie Chatterton hadn't been 
so clever they'd have had to ring the curtain 
down." 

Chatterton was playing the king. \Mien he saw 
that Cope was still there, after his first few lines, he 
crossed to Cope and took him by the elbow, and said, 
sauvely, "I trust, my dear count, that you will not 
report this unfortunate incident to His Royal High- 
ness until I've had time to — to — ah — " And at 
that point he led Cope through the door and gave 
him to the stage manager. 

The stage manager caught him by the collar and 
rushed him to the dressing-room stairs, and all but 
threw him do\^Ti into the basement. "You're fired 
— both of you," he told Gadkm; and Gadkin flared 
up and argued with him, forgetting Cope in his own 
quarrel. He followed the stage manager to his 
room, and they fought out their anger there, behind 
closed doors. \Mien they had arrived at laughter 
and apologies — ("After all, it was a hell of a com- 
pliment to Janie Nast's acting") — he went to find 
Cope, but Cope had gone. His uniform of robin's- 
egg blue was hanging on its hook and he had 
vanished. 



He had gone to kill himself. Only by killing him- 
self could he make Janet Nast understand the devo- 
tion that had inspired him to refuse to turn from 
her on the stage. Only so could he make her appre- 
18 [ 267 ] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

ciate his holy and uplifted yearning to distinguish 
himseK before her, no matter how madly — to com- 
pel her to look at him and be aware of him even if 
he had to stop the play. He had wanted to be able 
to say to her: "You were so wonderful, I couldn't — 
I couldn't turn away." And underneath this im- 
pulse of fascinated egotism there was another emo- 
tion. All through the first two acts he had been her 
boyish lover, the lodgekeeper's son. He had been 
ready to storm the world and tear down every 
barrier of circumstance in order to win her. The 
final scene of the second act had warned him that 
she was to be given to Prince Albert of Aquitania, 
and he had revolted against that frustration, as the 
whole disappointed audience had revolted against 
it. When she rose with her eloquent protest and 
cried, "No!" he had started and stiffened and 
exulted for her. It was impossible for him to desert 
her then. Hypnotized.'^ Yes, but aware of what he 
was doing, and determined to go through with it, 
though the whole court turned against him and tried 
to hoot him off the stage. 

It was not until he was thrust down the basement 
stairs, and tripped over his sword, and fell sprawling 
on the cement floor outside the supers' dressing room 
— it was not till the physical shock of this outrage 
awoke him from his dream — that he realized how 
absurd he must have seemed to her. To her! He 
did not care about the others; he was not conscious 
of them; he did not even see the supers in the dress- 

[£68] 



VANCE COPE 



ing room; he did not hear their puzzled questions. 
But absurd to her! No, that was not to be endured. 
And the only way for him to check her laughter was 
to kill himself. Then she would understand. Then 
she would appreciate what he was, what he had felt 
for her, what an indignity had been put upon his 
devotion to her. Then she would realize — they 
would all realize — that this thing had not been a silly 
farce, but a noble and appalling tragedy. 

When he left the theater, he was no longer ex- 
cited. All his emotion seemed to have passed. He 
had never felt more cool and determined in his life. 
He turned west on Twenty-third Street, to make his 
way to the Hudson River and drown himself. He 
would not take poison; he was not sure that a drug- 
gist would sell it to him. He would not shoot him- 
self; he had never handled firearms, and he did not 
know where to buy a revolver. Drowning was not 
only the easiest and surest way; it was the most 
poetic. They would find him in the Morgue, un- 
disfigured, peaceful, with an expression of calm 
pride on his cold lips. 

That thought of his body in the Morgue and the 
sight of some pink-silk underwear in a haber- 
dasher's window combined to remind him that his 
underclothes were unpresentable. His elbows had 
worn holes in the sleeves of his undershirt. He had 
only recently cut off the legs of his winter drawers 
at the knees, because his kneecaps had come through 
them. These were not garments that would look 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

well in a morgue. The pink-silk ones were the 
proper thing. He would die like a gentleman. 

It took all but his last two dollars to buy them, 
and then he had to go back to his room to put them 
on. He marked them with his name in ink, so that 
there might be no doubt of his identity, and he 
slipped them on with a tragic sort of satisfaction. 
They felt rich, luxurious. He brushed his clothes 
and changed his necktie. He wrote his name and 
address on an envelope and put it in his breast 
pocket. He would leave no message. (The silence 
of supreme contempt ! At such a moment, a gentle- 
man accused no one.) He brushed his hat and put 
it on at a defiant angle. (Debonair in the face of 
death! King Charles going to the scaffold.) He 
turned out his gas jet with the fateful gesture of 
immutable finality. (Out, out, brief candle!) He 
descended the stairs to the street of his doom, aristo- 
cratically indifferent to the canaille who had con- 
demned him. 

All this, of course, was the first effect of the silk 
underwear. It had a soothing, flattering sort of 
whispered touch as he walked; and there rose out 
of the depths of his physical being a distracting 
sense of consoled self-sufficiency. He was about to 
die — yes, but of his own choice, by his own hand, 
at his own convenience. There was no hurry. He 
would not falter — no fear of that ! He was on Broad- 
way, dressed like a gentleman, with money in his 
pocket; no reason why he should leave it for some 

[270] 



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attendant in the Morgue to spend. Die like a gen- 
tleman ! He went into a restaurant. 

Food is the very devil for overcoming poetic 
melancholy. What the pink-silk underwear had 
begun, a grilled chop and baked potato completed. 
He sent the waiter for a box of imported cigarettes, 
paid his bill, and sat back to smoke and sip his 
coffee. He felt a certain vague reluctance to part 
so soon with the luxury of silk against the skin. It 
occurred to him that his underclothes would look 
too new; that it would be evident he had bought 
them for the sad occasion. It would make him 
ridiculous. He foresaw a paragraph in the news- 
papers: "Young Cope, before committing his rash 
act, must have invested his last few dollars in a new 
suit of pink-silk underwear which showed no signs 
of wear. The police have learned that he bought 
them in a Twenty-third Street store only a few hours 
before he launched himself into eternity." Vanity! 
And laughter! Public laughter! And Janet Nast 
sorry, pitiful, but a little red and ashamed of him. 
No. He would have to wear his pink silk for a day or 
two, and have some money in his pocket when he 
died. If he could not earn it, he might borrow it 
from Gadkin and leave a will returning it to him. 

So, at least, we may reconstruct Cope's thoughts 
from what he told Gadkin of the evening, years 
afterward. At the time he told nothing. When 
Gadkin came to the boarding house, after the play, 
he found Cope walking up and down the threadbare 

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strip of carpet that sufficed to cover the floor of his 
narrow hall bedroom, calm, uncommunicative, su- 
perior, smoking expensive cigarettes. Gadkin tried 
to be jocular with him about his fiasco as a super. 
He regarded Gadkin thoughtfully, looked at his 
cigarette, flicked the ashes on the carpet, and con- 
tinued on his beat. Gadkin could make nothing of 
this new man-of -the- world manner; he could not 
see the pink-silk underwear. He asked Cope what 
he intended to do. Cope replied, **I'm going to get 
a position." 

"A position.? Where?" 

"In some office," Cope said. "I'm done with the 
stage." 

Gadkin laughed. "All right. I'll see how you 
feel about it in the morning. Good night." 

But in the morning Cope went out in search of 
his "position" before Gadkin woke. He was gone 
all day; and when he returned in the evening he was 
already an office boy. He had found his place in 
the play agency — Hart Corwin's play agency — from 
which he was graduated finally into moving pictures. 

6 

To Gadkin, I repeat, all this was merely laugh- 
able. He did not see that Cope's relations with his 
mother had probably developed a morbid strain in 
his instinct of affection, so that he unconsciously 
expected and feared ridicule from any person whom 

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he loved; and under the impulse of this unconscious 
expectation, he put himself into ridiculous situa- 
tions as a lover, and suffered under and revolted 
against the laughter that resulted. As a conse- 
quence, the emotion of love to Cope was inevitably 
the "bitter sweet" of those Elizabethan poets who 
complain so eloquently of their hard-hearted mis- 
tresses. And his fear of love included a fascinated 
fear of woman. 

Unfortunately for Gadkin, Cope's instinct of af- 
fection ran to this same morbid strain in his friend- 
ship. That was why he told Gadkin the ridiculous 
truth about his affair with the roses, and about the 
preposterous psychology of his scene in "Her Royal 
Happiness," and the bathetic effect of pink-silk 
underwear on his suicidal impulse, and all the rest 
of his absurdities. And, of course, Gadkin laughed 
at him. And, equally of course. Cope unconsciously 
hated him for his laughter, just as he hated his 
mother, and the actress of the roses, and Janet Nast, 
and everyone else whom he loved. It was certain 
that his friendship with Gadkin would end in a 
quarrel. Anyone could have predicted that. 

The quarrel came in Los Angeles, during the film 
production of "Her Royal Happiness." Gadkin 
was playing Prince Albert of Aquitania, with Janet 
Nast as Princess Aline. Cope had got him the part. 
Cope, indeed, had engineered the purchase of the 
play and most of the casting of it. He was now a 
sort of assistant director and holder of the script for 

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Ben Spenser, and they prepared the scenarios to- 
gether as they went along. 

"He broke into the film business quite naturally," 
Gadkin explained with malice. "As Hart Corwin's 
office boy, he'd had the i*un of the manuscript plays 
that came in, and for years he'd been lifting good 
dramatic ideas out of them, on the side, and selling 
them to the film companies. Ben Spenser sent for 
him on the strength of his successful piracies. As 
soon as they thought of doing 'Her Royal Happi- 
ness,' Cope wrote to me and got me to give up a 
good job to come out here, damn him." 

The engagement of Janet Nast for the filming of 
"Her Royal Happiness" was the sensation of the 
day. She was one of the first recognized theatrical 
stars to leave the stage for the movies. The press 
agent's announcement of her screen salary was 
printed in the newspaper headlines, and all the 
dramatic critics viewed her defection with prophetic 
alarm. 

"I don't know where they got the money to pay 
Mamma Nast the advance on the contract," Gadkin 
said. " They were operating on a shoestring. They 
were using an old ranch barn on Sunset Boulevard 
as a studio, and they bought second-hand sets out 
of storage in the East for their scenery, and when 
we went out on location we went in a flock of molting 
Fords. It was Ben Spenser's first venture on his own. 
He'd taken the camera man and the studio carpenter 
into partnership, so as not to have to pay them 

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salaries, and Cope wasn't getting more than enough 
to meet his board bill. They were all living on hope. 
There's always plenty of it in the air in Los Angeles. 
There has to be to keep us movie actors alive." 

How the quarrel between Cope and Gadkin began 
I do not know — and it is not important — but I imag- 
ine that Gadkin came to Los Angeles with the con- 
tempt for the movie business which it was natural 
for any actor from the legitimate stage to feel at 
that period of the world's history; and probably his 
contempt extended to the staff of the studio, includ- 
ing Cope. Cope, in the first flush of their renewal of 
friendship, had told him the truth about his great 
moment in the throne-room scene on the stage of 
the Lyceum, and it was dangerous information for 
Gadkin; it did not add to his respect for Cope. 
Gadkin saw himself as a successful and experienced 
actor, and it fell to Cope to break the news to him 
that his stage method was not subtle enough for the 
camera. Ben Spenser had been bawling at him: 
" Don't mug it, man ! Don't mug it ! " And Gadkin 
was not in a mood to accept criticism meekly from 
a theater usher who had made a fool of himself as 
a super. 

The final break came when Cope tried to change 
the part of Prince Albert of Aquitania by proposing 
that the lodgekeeper's son should be a prince in dis- 
guise and that the film should end with the Princess 
in his arms. This would take the leading male role 
away from Gadkin and give it to the other lover. 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

It would make Gadkin a sort of comic heavy, out- 
witted and absurd. "And you can tell the world," 
Gadkin said, "he didn't do that to me without a 
fight." 

The fight grew and spread until it involved about 
everyone in the company. All took sides, according 
to their interests. Making a film is a difficult 
collaboration that commonly includes an author, 
a producer, a director, some scenario writers, a 
number of actors, the publicity man, and all their 
friends and followers; they collaborate as the 
Allies worked together on the treaty of Versailles — 
each for himself and the result for the unhappy 
world. The author stands in the place of President 
Wilson — when all is over, he gets the blame. In the 
case of "Her Koyal Happiness," the author was 
mercifully dead. 

The Nasts agreed with Cope in his plan for re- 
writing; and Spenser himself at first accepted Cope's 
idea, having been persuaded that it was his own. 
But he was already a little jealous of Cope, because 
Cope was always suggesting just such horrible pop- 
ular improvements as this — improvements that 
might better have occurred to Spenser himself — 
and now, in the excitement of a studio argument with 
Gadkin, Cope appealed to Janet Nast for support 
instead of to Spenser. That was a mistake, and 
Gadkin took advantage of it. He got Spenser alone 
at the first opportunity and told him the story of 
Cope's previous effort to change the plot of "Her 

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Royal Happiness," and his subsequent attempt to 
die for Janet Nast, and the interference of his 
pink-silk underwear. 

And Spenser went off into cavernous roars of 
laughter. He had noticed, in the intimacy of his 
work with Cope, that no matter how shabbily 
dressed Cope might be, he always wore "silk 
undies." Ho-ho! Spenser had heard of Mormons 
wearing sacred underwear, but this! Ho-ho! He 
was so amused and contemptuous that he promptly 
made two mistakes himself; he told the story to 
Janet Nast and he failed to tell it to her mother. 

Mamma Nast was what is called "a cannibal 
mother" in the studios. She lived remorselessly on 
the flesh of her child, kept all Janet's earnings, gave 
her only pocket money, watched the men around 
her like a Spanish duenna, and jealously banished 
any companionship that threatened her sole control 
of her child's life. If Spenser had told his tale to 
Mamma Nast, Cope w^ould have disappeared from 
Janet Nast's company like a harem traitor in 
Stamboul. Spenser was kept silent, I suppose, by 
the fact that Mamma Nast and he were not on 
joking terms. 

When he told Janet Nast, in chuckling confidence, 
she looked confused and changed the subject. She 
made no comment to him and she gave no sign to 
Cope. She kept to herself whatever thoughts she 
had, said nothing to her mother, and went through 
the afternoon's work in the studio, deaf to Spenser's 

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sly references to pink-silk underwear and blind to 
Cope's air of persecuted depression. 

Cope had lost his fight. Spenser had decided that 
the Prince of Aquitania was to marry the Princess 
Aline, and Gadkin played his scenes with more than 
royal self-complacency. But that night Cope was 
summoned by Mamma Nast to her suite in the 
hotel, and two days later the company heard that 
the Nasts had bought out Spenser and his partners; 
that they were going to complete the film according 
to Cope's plan; that Gadkin and all his partisans 
w^ere out of power; and that Cope was the produc- 
ing manager of the new "Janet Nast International 
Film Producing Corporation." 



All this, of course, was ancient history before I 
arrived in Los Angeles. Already, to the studios, 
"Her Royal Happiness" was an old, early, museum 
masterpiece. Thanks to Cope's rewriting, it had 
been an enduring popular success, one of those 
steady small-town successes that make fortunes for 
picture producers. None of Cope's later films had 
topped it. "Samson and Delilah" had been a 
Broadway riot; so had "Antony and Cleopatra"; 
and these two productions had made Cope famous 
abroad — particularly in France, where the "fear-of- 
woman" theme is always soul satisfying — but Pu- 
ritan America had found no psychic comfort in 

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either film; and "Manon Lescaut" was almost a 
failure financially. 

"He's done," Gadkin exulted. "He never had 
anything, anyway. The public's tired of the big 
spectacular and the costume film, but that isn't the 
real trouble with Cope. He put himself over with 
that stuff, but he had nothing behind it. He has 
no heart, no sympathy, nothing but conceit. He 
tried to do the real thing in 'Her Fine Feathers' — 
real American heart-throb drama — and look at it! 
They tell me he lost money on it. And he's ruined 
Janie Nast. He's had her playing cold-blooded little 
vamps until the public hates her. If you go into 
pictures with Cope, you'll never get anywhere. 
He's done, I tell you. He's done." 

Gadkin was a human being until he talked about 
Cope. Then he became all the furies, a woman 
scorned, and the villain in a war film. You had to 
discount everything he said by at least 90 per cent. 
Even so, I was afraid that he was right about Cope's 
being "done" when I saw how things were at the 
studio. The spirit of Mamma Nast pervaded the 
whole place, and it was a spirit of selfish pettiness 
that begot nothing but bitterness and disloyalty. 
Janet Nast was known as "Nasty Janie" and her 
mother's nickname was unreportable. Cope was out 
of touch with his staff. They despised him secretly 
because the Nasts appeared to dominate him, and 
he refused to hear any complaints against their rule; 
consequently, he gave the effect of being unap- 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

proachable in the midst of palace grievances that 
sapped the loyalty of his aides. And he had re- 
pellent peculiarities of temperament. I saw one of 
them during my second week at the studio. 

He had come there, that morning, to direct the 
scene of a fancy-dress ball. The company were all 
waiting for him, and they greeted him according to 
the privileges of their positions as he moved around 
among them, looking them over, chaffing them, 
flattering them, or criticizing them. Tall, thin, in 
dark clothes, a black stock tied twice around his 
collar, one lock of dark hair down on his forehead, 
pale, he made an ascetic, a scholarly, a poetic 
figure against his background and surroundings. 
But the contrast seemed to me too obviously de- 
signed and self-conscious. He smiled too much with 
his lips and not enough with his eyes. When he 
listened seriously, he had an intense abstracted gaze 
that was too affectedly direct and concentrated. 

Cuthbert Anderson, his new leading man, was 
talking to me as Cope approached. They were on 
friendly terms; they had not quarreled; but Ander- 
son whispered to me: "I'm not going to say 'Good 
morning' to him till he says it to me. Watch what 
happens." 

As Cope came in our direction Anderson pre- 
tended to be interested in the hang of a peasant's 
sheepskin, which he was pulling forward and hitch- 
ing around on his shoulders, unaware of Cope's 
approach. Cope nodded to me — he had already 

[280] 



VANCE COPE 



spoken to me in his office — but he went by without 
greeting Anderson. After he had passed, Anderson 
looked at me and winked. We continued our con- 
versation. In a few minutes Cope returned toward 
us, but this time Anderson was busy with the cross 
gartering on his peasant ankle. Cope passed again 
without speaking. I asked Anderson, "Why are 
you doing it.'^" 

"I want to make him speak to me first." 

"Why.?" 

"The other day, when I said 'Good morning,' 
he pretended not to hear me. He does it every now 
and then to somebody — just to humiliate them. He 
gets you fond of him by being as sweet as can be, 
and then he does something like that — snubs you. 
He keeps these young people in a little hell of small 
cruelties, mixed with kindnesses that you can't 
resist." 

Everyone was ready to go on with the scene, but 
Cope did not begin it. He continued moving about, 
rearranging furniture unnecessarily, readjusting 
lights, and passing and repassing Anderson, who 
continued to miss every opportunity to greet him. 
Xhe whole thing was done so clandestinely that I 
supposed no one was aware of it but ourselves. 
Certainly nothing in Cope's manner betrayed it; 
he must have been uncertain whether Anderson was 
doing it purposely or not. But after at least half 
an hour's delay Janet Nast, in the costume of a 
Fellah woman, came over to us as if casually, con- 

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fronted Anderson, and said, "Will you please say 
*Good morning' to him and let us get to work?" 

He laughed. "All right." 

She left, unsmiling. 

"She's on to him,'' he explained. 

The next time that Cope passed us Anderson ad- 
dressed a cheerful greeting to him. Cope answered 
as if he had not noticed Anderson before, talked with 
us a moment, and then called for the scene. I felt 
sorry for him. With such a childishly sensitive 
egotism, how he must suffer! And make others 
suffer! Janet Nast, for instance. By what disil- 
lusioning experience had her understanding of him 
been acquired? 

She was not at all as I had expected to find her. 
I had seen her on the screen as a little dark Delilah, 
inscrutable, faintly smiling, treacherous, with some 
secret personality of her own that remained a 
mystery. And she had repeated the same effect of 
hidden mind and purpose in her Cleopatra. An 
Oriental idol, honey brown, moving only her slow 
eyes, borne solemnly in procession or enthroned on 
something like an altar, she had given the impression 
of being inexplicably adored and malevolent, wooden 
and cruel. As Manon, the mystery became a secret 
and unexplained discontent: she deserted her lover 
in a sort of restless dissatisfaction with existence, 
and she returned to him in the same mood; in her 
death scene in the desert, she gazed out over the 
sands as if that desolation were the picture of her 

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VANCE COPE 



life; and she closed her eyes on it, indifferent to 
her lover's agonized embraces, equally bored by life 
and death. What was at the heart of this mystery 
in her? 

Now that I saw her in the flesh, she seemed to be 
merely an ordinary young woman, with a pale olive 
complexion and a light and commonplace voice, 
earning her living by allowing Cope to direct her 
to his own ends in scenes which she did not appear 
to take the trouble to understand. He dictated 
every gesture, every change of expression for her, 
planning his effects without consulting her, and 
studying them, without her, in the "daily rushes" 
that were shown him in the projection room. He 
seemed to be using her as a flexible and expressive 
marionette. The deepening lines of discontent in 
her face must have dictated the type of character 
that could be imputed to her in his pictures, but 
that dissatisfaction seemed to me no more than the 
expression of her own vacuity. 

I was supposed to be learning how scenarios are 
written and acquiring what the studio called "the 
picture point of view." To that end, I was loafing 
around the lot, watching the rehearsals and the 
work before the camera, observing the daily rushes 
in the projection room, sitting in editorial conference 
among the scenario writers, and helping to edit the 
titles. And I had been invited to take sides in an 
unexpected dispute. 

The picture on which they were working was a 
19 [ 283 1 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

film version of Daudet's Sappho, which Cope had 
tentatively called "Even as You and I." He had 
first planned to end the story as Daudet ended it, 
with Sappho returning to her convict lover and Jean 
deserted at the quay in Marseilles. But after doing 
the scenes between Jean and his young fiancee, 
Irene (played by Mary Merivale), Cope had pro- 
posed to end the film with Jean married to Irene 
and living happily ever after. His scenario staff 
accepted this cheerful alteration enthusiastically, 
but Mamma Nast objected, for obvious reasons. 
She and Cope and Janet had a long private wrangle, 
and the issue of it was still in doubt. Meanwhile, 
Cope had begun to photograph the opening scene in 
the novel — the fancy-dress ball in Dechelette's 
studio, at which Jean and Sappho first met. And 
I was puzzled. 

I was puzzled to know why Cope should have pro- 
posed to desert his favorite " fear-of- woman " theme 
in "Sappho" and end it with Sappho's victim con- 
soled in the arms of a young wife. The editorial 
staff could give me no light. They saw simply that 
the new ending would be popular with everybody 
except the Nasts; and they wanted a popular ending 
and they longed to see the Nasts humiliated. Cuth- 
bert Anderson, the young leading man, was aware 
of nothing but his own personal conflict with Cope's 
peculiarities; I doubt whether he knew what the film 
was about. I did not see that Janet Nast was much 
more intelligent. I could hardly ask her mother. 

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Mamma Nast, as the fancy-dress ball began, re- 
treated to her canvas chair beside Janet's stage 
dressing table, where she sat, silently critical, watch- 
ing the world. She never interfered with Cope's 
direction. She had a part in all the financial doings 
of the corporation, of course; and she was always 
quarreling with the publicity staff; and she had to 
pass upon the scenarios and the continuities before 
they were accepted for her daughter; but as soon as 
a scene was begun she withdrew behind her daugh- 
ter's throne and let the puppet move through the 
gestures that had been agreed upon. 

At a little distance from Mamma Nast and 
farther in the background, Mary Merivale was 
sitting on a bench against the wall. She was not 
taking part in the ballroom scene; as Irene Bouche- 
reau she did not enter the story until years later. 
She was in her street clothes, but without her hat, 
and her small brother — a child of five or six — was 
leaning against her knee. She was not more than 
eighteen years old, herself, but she made an ideal 
picture of young maternity, posing with her arm 
around the boy, placidly watching the busy scene 
at which he stared so round-eyed. Then Cope, in 
passing, stopped a moment to speak to her, and 
she stood up, her hand on the boy's shoulder, smil- 
ing at Cope. It was an extraordinary smile, with- 
out a tremor of self-consciousness, trusting and 
grateful, meek to the point of adoration, and 
flushed with unembarrassed pleasure. It gave 

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me a sudden suspicion of the truth, and I looked 
away to see whether anyone else had noticed it. 
Mamma Nast had; and its reflection seemed to 
glint illuminatingly in the hard eye with which 
she regarded it. 

I felt sorry for Mary Merivale. I confess it 
proudly. I was probably the last person in America 
to have the privilege of pitying that triumphant 
young woman. I went over to her bench and sat 
beside her, out of some vague desire to shield her 
from Mamma Nast. 

She greeted me with no such smile as she had 
given Cope. She seemed shy. She kept her eyes on 
the child and spoke in a low, composed voice that 
was hardly audible. It was like the abashed voice 
of a country girl on her first visit to city relatives. 
And she was a country girl — ^almost. She had come 
from the little town of Findellen, in New Jersey. 
I knew Findellen. 

Really.? 

I knew it as a name on a station signboard. I 
had never been on a train that stopped there. 

We were a long way from home. 

She admitted it without any wistful regret. 
There had been nothing to keep her in Findellen. 
She was an orphan, and little Billy was dependent 
on her. As long as he was a baby she could support 
him. But how was she to educate him in Findellen 
as he grew up? 

She was naturally reluctant to talk about herself, 

[286] 



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but she was delighted to talk about Billy. He was 
her pride, her motive power, her excuse for being. 
She had worked for him, as a waitress in the only 
hotel in Findellen; and it was to amuse him that 
she had gone wearily at night to the moving- 
picture theater that offered Findellen its only 
public entertainment. There she had seen him 
on the screen — or a boy who was not half so 
sweet and cute and knowing as he — and she had 
begun to save for the purpose of bringing him to 
Los Angeles some day. She had intended to work 
as a waitress and to send him to school on the 
money that he might earn in the studios during 
the summer holidays. 

You should have heard her account of her trip 
across the continent. She started from Findellen 
with everything she owned in two straw suitcases 
and a number of paper boxes tied with string, 
ignorant, trusting, unprepared for any difficulty. 
And the traveling world helped her as if she and 
Billy were two infants consigned in the conductor's 
care, with shipping tags in their buttonholes. They 
journeyed in day coaches. She lived on the charity 
of her fellow passengers because she had only enough 
money left to buy Billy milk and biscuits after she 
had paid for their railroad tickets. Some one gave 
her money; unknown to her, it was tucked into the 
pocket of her jacket as it lay on the seat. A train- 
man refused to let her pay for Billy's food, which he 
ordered from the dining car. A woman took Billy 

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into her Pullman berth at night so that he might 
have a comfortable bed. 

When she arrived in Los Angeles she had not even 
street-car fare. She said good-by to her railroad 
friends, left her baggage in the station, and set out 
to walk to the nearest studio with Billy. The near- 
est studio was Cope's. And she walked through the 
casting director's office to Cope, and through Cope 
to a small lead in Sappho, without any idea of what 
a miracle her progress was. In spite of all the im- 
peding press and struggle of competitive ambitions 
around her, she had continued to move forward 
blindly, in the sublime soft-voiced confidence of 
complete ignorance. As a picture actress she was a 
director's dream. When she played a scene, she 
seemed to hear and see nothing but Cope, alone 
with him, unaware even of the camera, express- 
ing instantly any emotion that he asked for, with 
absorbed naturalness. And she did not think of 
herself as an actress at all. She was only in the 
studio to find an opening for Billy. Was I writing 
a story for Mr. Cope.^ Would I put a part for 
Billy in it.^ 

Naturally, I replied that I should like to put a 
part for her in it, too. She rather frowned over that, 
until I explained that Billy would probably act 
better with her than with anyone else. "Yes," she 
agreed, much pleased. "I think he would." 

If we put them in as mother and child, would she 
be able to act the mother .^^ 

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"I ought to be able to," she said. "I'm the only 
mother he's ever had." 

What had become of his mother? 

His mother had deserted him. She had deserted 
them both, but Mary spoke of her always as 
"Billy's mother," not her own, until I supposed 
she was speaking of her stepmother, and she 
corrected me. 

I forget, now, how the details of the story came 
out. I was so excited by discovering the resemblance 
between her history and Cope's that my recollection 
of the conversation is confused. Her mother had 
been a show girl who retired from Broadway to a 
bungalow in Findellen when she married a New York 
commuter. There had been several quarrels and 
separations between them before Billy was born. 
Then the father was killed in a street accident and 
the mother went back "on the road." She ceased 
sending them money. They had not heard from 
her for years. 

"Did you tell this to Cope.^^" I asked. 

"Why?" 

I was just wondering. 

"Yes," she said. "I told him when I asked him 
for a part for Billy. I told him I was sure that Billy 
would be able to act, because his mother was an 
actress. And he asked me about her, and I told 
him." 

"What did he say?" 

She looked at me, puzzled. "Nothing." 

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"Didn't he say that Billy was lucky to have 
youf 

That startled her. "Yes," she said. "How did 
you know?" 

8 

I went to luncheon with some members of the 
scenario department, but I was so full of my dis- 
covery that I wanted to talk rather than eat. I had 
a theory not only about Cope and Mary Merivale 
and Janet Nast, but about the movies ; and I wanted 
to air it. It was a theory involving the subconscious 
mind, our dream mind that makes dream pictures 
for itself while our conscious intelligence is asleep, 
just as the moving-picture screen makes day-dream 
pictures for us, waking, in the theater. I wanted 
to point out that this subconscious mind thought in 
symbols, and that, whether we were awake or sleep- 
ing, we responded to those symbols with automatic 
and ungovernable emotions. I wanted to argue 
that Janet Nast had become a repellent symbol to 
the American public because she had been cast as 
a "vampire" so often that she was a symbol of fear 
— of sex fear. But I started by pointing out that 
the movie vamp had lost her popularity; that the 
most popular American actress on the stage or the 
screen was always the one who made the least 
sexual appeal. And before I could get any farther 
we were lost in a squabble about Puritanism and 
censorship. 

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I succeeded only in saying that Mary Merivale 
was worth ten Janet Nasts to a picture producer 
because she had the face of a young Madonna and 
because the mother symbol is all powerful in the 
American mind. "If you're going to make money 
in this studio," I predicted, foolishly, "you'll have 
to drop Janet and the vamps and get busy with 
Mary and a little mother love." 

Anyone who talks that way in a moving-picture 
studio is a simple soul. Janet Nast met us coming 
out of the projection room, in the afternoon, and 
asked me to have dinner with her mother and her, 
that evening. And I suspected that some one had 
reported our conversation to her. 

I could only congratulate myself that my theory 
about Cope and her and Mary Merivale had not 
got into the argument. It was this: 

Janet was as full of unconscious and repressed 
hatred of her mother as Cope of his. Any child to 
whom a mother is cruel has that hatred, and Mamma 
Nast had been cannibal cruel to Janet. Who else 
had so suppressed her and used her and dominated 
her and prevented her from getting a life of her own 
and love and children? Here was the secret of her 
dissatisfaction and her expression of inexplicable 
discontent. When she heard that Cope had once 
tried to kill himself for love of her, she must have 
seen in him a possibility of happiness and escape. 
But, unfortunately, she appeared to Cope with her 
mother beside her, and Cope must have responded 

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to them both with the mingled fear and aversion 
that he had felt for his own mother. He must have 
seen Mamma Nast as Janet grown old. And in his 
fear of Janet he had cast her always as the symbol 
of his fear of woman, in "Samson and Delilah" and 
"Antony and Cleopatra" and all the rest. 

With Mary Merivale it was quite another matter. 
She came to him, leading by the hand a boy who 
might have been himself. She was the symbol of 
everything that his mother should have been; and 
at the same time he could project on her and Billy 
the self-pity that was at the base of his sensitive 
egotism. No wonder he wanted to change the end 
of "Sappho" so that he — in the person of Jean — • 
might find an imagined happiness in her arms. 

You think that this is fanciful .^^ Well, at least it has 
the merit of explaining what now began to happen. 

The dinner with the Nasts was to be an informal 
family affair at seven, and they assured me that I 
did not need to dress. "Don't you believe it," 
Gadkin warned me at the hotel. "Mamma Nast 
used to be a wardrobe woman and she always dines 
in state." 

He had further information to offer. The Nasts 
had a toy manor house in the Beverly Hills district, 
where Janet lived isolated with her mother and a 
retinue of servants, as detached from the business 
of housekeeping as if she were the one guest in a 
summer hotel. She was driven to the studio with 
her mother, every morning, in a limousine up- 

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bolstered in plum purple to match the chauffeur's 
livery and the lap robes; and the machine started 
and stopped on her mother's orders, transporting 
Janet like a passenger in a Pullman car over a road 
that she had seen too often. She ate under her 
mother's eye; she slept in a room off her mother's; 
she came occasionally to a Hollywood dance with 
her mother, sat beside her, danced before her, and 
departed at her word and under her wing. Like 
many of the successful moving-picture stars, she did 
not belong to any fast set in Hollywood. She had 
no dissipations. She had no life of her own at all, 
so far as Gadkin had been able to see. She read the 
motion-picture magazines and talked the gossip of 
the motion-picture studios. She did not read the 
newspapers; she let her mother's breakfast-table 
comment tell her what was in them. She did not 
seem to Gadkin to be repressed, but empty. If she 
spoke to few in the studio, they might think it 
was because she was proud, but he was sure it was 
because she had nothing to say. "You'll enjoy 
your dinner," he ended. "It '11 be more fun than a 
funeral." 

As a matter of fact, it was a highly edible dinner, 
well cooked and well served, with flowers and shaded 
candles and assorted glasses and large complexities 
of cutlery and all the other stage properties of care- 
ful elegance as you see it depicted in the films — 
including two of the prettiest dining-room maids in 
Los Angeles, where every waitress seems to have 

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arrived with the ambition and the physical cre- 
dentials of a movie actress. Gadkin was right 
about one thing: the dinner frocks were thorough- 
bred. Mrs. Nast looked the white-haired, high- 
nosed aristocrat, and Janet was everything you 
could ask of birth and beauty. The maids waited 
on her with a respectful air of envious adoration. 
She accepted their offers of food as she accepted my 
offers of conversation, absent-mindedly, listening 
to her mother, whom she appeared intent on draw- 
ing out for me and exhibiting at her best. 

In response to this insistent attention. Mamma 
Nast took her seat at the head of the conversation 
and proved her right to it. She talked like a keen 
old wine-drinking dowager, and before the dinner 
was over I had nothing but respect for her. She 
knew that a war had broken out in Europe, and she 
was the first person I had met in Hollywood who 
seemed to have heard of it. She was interested in 
national politics. She was eager to hear all the 
latest theatrical gossip from Broadway. But 
whether you discussed the war, politics, or the 
stage, it was useless to talk to her in terms of what 
you had read in the newspapers. She had the hard- 
boiled manner of taking it for granted that news- 
paper men wrote only for public consumption, and 
she wanted to know the inside story that lay behind 
the newspaper's presentable facts. If you had no 
inside story to give, she moved on in search of a 
topic that you knew something about. 

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When the coffee was served she rose briskly. 
"I don't drink it," she said. "It spoils my after- 
dinner nap. Excuse me. I need a few minutes' 
sleep. I'll be down again before you leave." 

Janet watched her go. "We'll take our coffee 
in the garden," she told the maid. "And bring the 
cigarettes." She looked at me for almost the first 
time and smiled in her own right. 

One side of the dining room opened through glass 
doors upon a tile-paved veranda with a Moorish 
awning. Steps went down to the lawn; and across 
the grass, among the flower beds, there was a sort 
of glorified summerhouse like a small Greek temple, 
where a flying Mercury stood on tiptoe over a pool 
of water plants. Janet led us in procession to this 
pillared arbor, the maids follov/ing with cushions 
for the stone exedra seats and a wicker serving 
table for the coffee. "Don't turn on the light," 
Janet said. And she explained to me: "My eyes 
are so thed from the Kliegs." 

The inevitable movie moon was shining, and I 
could see all the flowers of all the four seasons bloom- 
ing together around us, in the mad liberated way 
that flowers have in southern California. I thought 
of remarking that the climate seemed to have a 
similar effect of emancipation upon the Easterners 
who came to Los Angeles; but, on second thoughts, 
it sounded rather too sociological as a beginning for 
conversation under the circumstances. In that dim 
diffusion of reflected moonshine, Janet looked like 

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the patron saint of all young romantic poets. I did 
not know what to say to her. She poured coffee, 
and passed a cup to me, and settled back against 
the cushions and the curved stone seat. I struck 
a match less to light a cigarette than to occupy a 
pause of awkward hesitation. She waited, her eyes 
on the flame. As soon as I blew it out she asked, 
breathlessly, "Is he in love with that girl.?" 

9 

For a moment I had not the vaguest notion what 
she was talking about, but I understood as soon as 
I had asked, "Who?" 

Cope, of course! She said his name in a flatted 
tone. I did not need to have her identify "that 
girl" as Mary Merivale. 

It struck me that she was being rather offensively 
frank in asking a stranger such a question, and I 
decided resentfully to reply with a frankness equally 
offensive. I said: "Yes, but I don't believe he 
knows it." 

She drew her scarf up on her shoulders as if she 
felt suddenly cold, and, wrapping it around her, she 
sat in silence, staring out at the moonlight. I waited 
for her. It was her conversation. I had not begun 
it. 

She asked, at last, "How do you know it?" 

How did I know it? I coughed over the cigarette. 
"Well," I said, "it's mevitable. It's subconscious. 

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She happens to be the irresistible starting-signal to 
his instinct of affection." 

She turned her head to see me. " What ? " 

That was all right. She asked it as if she sus- 
pected I was crazy. I thought to myself: "Well, 
let's see if I am. Let's see whether this theory will 
stand trial. If there's anythmg in it, she'll find 
some way to put it to the test. Let her have it." 
So I drew my lungs full of smoke, and I began. 

I told her what I knew of Cope's youth and his 
relations with his mother. She asked, "How do you 
know this?'^ and I replied, "You'll have to take my 
word for it." 

I told her what I had learned of Mary Merivale, 
and pointed out the parallel between Mary's child- 
hood and Cope's. I dissected Cope's instinct of 
affection and I showed her how morbidly it worked. 
She said, "That's all absurd." 

I recounted his affair with the actress of the roses 
and compared it with his behavior with herself, in 
the throne-room scene on the stage of the Lyceum. 
She let her scarf slip from her shoulders and leaned 
forward listening. 

I traced the origin of his subconscious fear of 
women, showed how it began with his mother, 
developed it through both the stage mcidents, and 
exposed it full grown in the theme of his moving 
pictures. I identified her to herself as a symbol for 
this sex fear in him and showed her how she acted 
on him as a surrogate for her mother and his. She 

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put her clenched fist to her lips and said in a low 
tone something that sounded like, "Damn her!" 

I explained how Mary Merivale escaped suspicion 
by being the guardian angel of little Billy, in whom 
Cope unconsciously saw his childhood self. "And 
that," I said, "is why, for the first time, he wants 
to abandon his fear-of-woman theme and end his 
picture in a happy marriage. If he doesn't marry 
her, I don't know what '11 stop him. Not ridicule. 
As a man of thirty-five, it '11 be ridiculous for him 
to marry a child of eighteen, but unconsciously he 
seeks to be ridiculous in love. It seems to me that 
the whole thing is inevitable. She's in love with 
him. The first attempt to interfere between them 
will merely precipitate the end. It '11 bring to the 
surface all this unconscious emotion that he's un- 
aware of now. He'll realize that he wants to marry 
her in fact, instead of imaginatively in the plot of 
a picture." 

It convinced her, apparently. Certainly it gave 
her thought. She hunched forward, her elbows on 
her knees, her face in her hands, looking down at 
her feet. After a long silence, she asked, hoarsely: 
"How about me.^ What's the matter with me?" 

I suppose the moonlight had affected me. I 
could not have felt more impersonal if we had been 
a pair of disembodied spirits, sitting in pale spiritual 
glory, looking back at the world that we had left 
hanging moonlike over us. 

"I don't know you," I said. "I only see that 

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you're unhappy and dissatisfied. You're full of 
suppressed hatred and revolt against your mother — 
and it can't come out against her, because you love 
her, so it comes out against everyone else and makes 
you disliked." 

"They call me * Nasty Janie,'" she said, chok- 
ingly, "behind my back." 

"Yes. That's inevitable, too. If you could 
realize that you've a perfect right to hate your 
mother, so long as you don't make her unhappy by 
showing it; if you could let it into your mind, so 
long as you kept it out of your conduct — that would 
help you. It would make you more pleasant with 
everybody else. And it 'd change your expression. 
Your dissatisfaction with life is showing on the 
films. It's in your face. It's going to spoil your 
whole career." 

She brought me back from impersonality with a 
cry of scorn. "Career!" She threw her hands out 
at nothing. "It's empty! That's what it is — 
empty! I haven't anything — any life. Look at it! 
What is it?" Tears strangled her. She began to 
beat on her knee with her fist. "I can't! I can't 
go on ! I won't ! If he marries her — I'll kill myself. 
I'll kill myself! It 'd serve her right." She meant 
her mother. "She's — she's done it. She's pre- 
vented me. She's kept everybody away from me." 
And she broke down, sobbing. 

There was nothing to do but let her cry it out. 
I went on talking. "Your mother's done what 

20 [ 299 ] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

everybody does. She's tried to keep you altogether 
for herself, the way we all do with anyone we love. 
She's pathetic. For all her cleverness, she's a 
pathetic old woman. She sees that you're unhappy 
and she doesn't know why. If she understood it, 
she'd do anything you wanted. You don't need to 
worry about her. She'll be all right. She has a 
mind. And it's a mind that you need — a business 
mind — to protect you from the people who would 
take advantage of you if she weren't watching. 
Let her manage the business part of your life, and 
you look after the rest of it yourself." 

"There isn't any," she sobbed. 

"Then make some." 

"How.?" 

"Find some one you can love, and marry him." 

"I don't want to marry anyone but him." 

"Cope.?" 

She nodded tearfully. 

"Well then, marry him." 

"How.?" 

"I don't know," I said. "That '11 take some 
thinking. You'll have to do consciously what Mary 
Merivale has done without knowing it. You'll have 
to resymbolize yourself, make yourself a symbol of 
pity and affection to him instead of a symbol of sex 
fear. It may not be possible, but it's worth trying." 

At any rate, it stopped her weeping. She sat up, 
dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief. And 
very foolishly, I began to suggest a plan of campaign. 

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First, she ought to go to Cope and withdraw her 
opposition to his happy endmg of the "Sappho" 
film. She should try to do that in such a way as to 
take his side tacitly against her mother. And she 
might propose that as Sappho she should realize 
where Jean's happiness lay and sacrifice herself in 
order to send him to his bride. That would give 
her a conspicuous part in the happy ending, and it 
would help to resymbolize her not only with Cope, 
but with the public. "The important thing," I 
said, "is to contrive to do all this in opposition to 
your mother, so that Cope will feel that you're 
taking his part against /ler." 

Then she ought to take advantage of the fact 
that, like Cope himself, she was the child of a cruel 
parent. "Let him project his self-pity on you, 
instead of on Mary Merivale. You ought to be 
able to work that out in the fight about the happy 
ending. Tell him you hate your mother, if you want 
to. Appeal to him in any way you please. Ask 
him to protect you against her. You can make up 
with her later." 

And she should mark herself, at once, as the 
friend and protector of Mary Merivale and little 
Billy. "They're probably living in some cheap 
boarding house. Get them out of it. Bring them 
here if you can, to live with you. Don't let her dress 
in that little coop in the studio. Take her into your 
dressing-room bungalow. And mother Billy. Let 
Cope see you. Have Billy with you whenever Cope 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

is around. But be careful. You'll have to win Mary 
first, or you'll have her jealous of you and the boy." 

"It's — it's hypocritical," she said. 

"Not at all. It can't be done hypocritically. 
The boy particularly. You can't deceive a child. 
He'll see through you at once if you only pretend 
affection and good will for him. So will Mary. 
She's no fool. People sense good will and affection 
even when it's hidden under a forbidding manner. 
You know that. In the same way, they sense the 
opposite of good will even when you disguise it. 
It's only the public that can be deceived by appear- 
ances. The people you live with know you better 
than you think. If you love Cope, he knows it. 
He's afraid of you and you'll have to win him by 
making Mary Merivale and Billy and all these 
other people love you." 

"I don't dislike them," she defended herself. 

"All right, then. Let them see it and make them 
fond of you. Hate your mother and love everybody 
else." 

She said, in a new tone: "I don't really hate her. 
She didn't know what she was doing. She didn't 
see — any more than I did." 

"Good. If you've come as far as that, the rest 
should be easy." 

She thought a moment. Then she added: "I 
don't dislike you — even after what you've said about 
me — here and at the studio." 

"You mean at luncheon?" 

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She said, forgivingly, "Yes." 

I laughed. "It doesn't make any difference to 
me. I'm only telling you the truth. I like, im- 
mensely, the way you've taken it." 

"Then you'll help me.?" 

"Certainly. All I can." 

"You can help me a great deal. You can come 
with me now and see Vance — Mr. Cope — with me." 

"What about.?" 

"About changing the ending of the film." 

"I will," I said, "in a hog's valise." 

"What does that mean?" 

"It's Irish for *not on your life.'" 

"But you mustJ^ She rose and came to me. 

"Impossible." 

She sat down beside me and put her hand on my 
arm, almost childishly. "You're the only person 
that's ever tried to help me. It's the first time any- 
one has ever told me the truth about myself. I 
want to change. I want people to like me. I want 
to be affectionate — and happy." 

"You're wangling me," I said. 

Her eyes glinted mischievously. "You like me. 
I know you do, or you wouldn't have taken so much 
trouble with me." 

"You're a hypocrite. You're flattering me. 
You're trying to flirt with me." 

She began to laugh. "Come on. It'll be fun. 
Come and help me. You started me. You'll have 
to see me through. 

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"What are you going to do?" 

"Come along and see." 

She had me by the sleeve. She pulled me to my 
feet and started off with me. I went like a dog on 
a rope, planting myself in an obstinate protest 
every now and then, and being coaxed and jerked 
along with determined high spirits. 

"I'm a writer," I complained, "not a psychi- 
atrist. I can't help you with Cope." 

"Then come and see a movie queen snaring her 
mate. You can write it up — after I've landed 
him." 

"Don't be so forward. Let go my hand." 

"You'd better com^e or I'll put my arm around 

you." 

"Heaven forbid!" 

We were at the dining-room door. "I'll go," I 
said, "if you tell me exactly what you plan to do — 
and to say." 

"I'll tell you in the car," she cried. "Get your 
coat on. I'll run upstairs and explain to mother that 
we're going for a little drive in the moonlight." 

And while she was upstairs a miracle happened. 
After I had put on my overcoat in the hall, my mind 
began to work. I had an idea. 

"Listen," I said, as she came downstairs swiftly 
to me. "I want you to recall something. What 
was the color of the costume you wore in the throne- 
room scene of *Her Royal Happiness '.f^ I mean in 
the stage production." 

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She tilted her head prettily and closed one eye. 
"Pink!" 

"Pink? Not really!" 

"Yes. Pink silk." 

"Fine! Have you a pink dress you can put on?" 

"Don't be ridiculous. I can't wear pink any 
more." 

"Why not?" 

"Where are your eyes?" She indicated the dark- 
brown wave over her ear. "I used to have fair hair 
as a child and they blondined it." 

"Were you fair haired as the Princess Aline?" 

"Certainly." 

"Oh, gosh!" That was a knockout. "Mary's 
fair." 

"Of course." 

"I'll bet Cope has a fair-haired love image." 

"A what?" 

"Never mind. Have you anything at all pink 
that you can wear?" 

She began to shake her head, and stopped. 
"I've a silk sweater — a sort of rose pink." 

"Great! The very thing. Put that on." 

She started upstairs again to get it, and then 
another miracle happened. I had another idea. 
"Wait! Have you a blond wig? " 

She turned on the stair to confront me, flushed 
and spunky. "Now listen to me. If I can't get 
him without wearing a blond wig, I'll die an old 
maid." 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

"All right," I said. "I don't think he's good 
enough for you, anyway. His taste is immature." 

She made a face at me. "Talk about flirting. 
Wait a minute till I get the sweater. I have a blond 
wig at the studio. I'll find it to-morrow, if you'll 
tell me why you want it." 

"I'll tell you on our 'little drive in the moon- 
light.'" 

10 

The car was what is called a landaulet, I think; 
and the chauffeur, sitting outside, got most of the 
moon. Cope had built himself a Spanish rough-cast, 
on a foothill above Clearwater Canon, and the drive 
to his house ought to have been magnificent with 
mountain vistas as we ascended the ravine, and 
with wide moonlit panoramas as we came out on 
the hilltops. What I saw of it was only a blurred 
background for Janet Nast. She had put on her 
silk sweater and a jaunty old-rose sports cap that 
looked like a soldier's, and she was as full of the 
devil as a Hollywood flapper on her way to a hootch 
party. 

"Why must I wear pink.^^" she asked. 

"Because you wore pink when he first fell in love 
with you. And then pink-silk underwear saved his 
life." 

She remembered the story and shrieked with 
laughter. "I'll get some pink things," she cried. 
*' Camisoles and shoulder ribbons and " 

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"That '11 do." 
Prude! Puritan! Step-ins!" 
The word is new to me. Now get down to busi- 
ness. I want you to play a blond in his next 
picture — in a yellow wig and all the pankest pink 
you can find." 

"I hate pink, too." 

"And don't give it up after you marry — the way 
girls give up the piano. And if you can't sleep in a 
blond wig, wear a pink-silk boudoir cap." 

She shrieked again. 

"Now be serious. Here's what you have to do 
to-night." And I began to lay out our next scene. 

She listened with smiling gravity, in high color, 
like a child just come into school from the play- 
ground. We planned out the whole act carefully. 
"And don't overdo it," I cautioned her. "Play it 
to me as much as you can, and just take him in as 
a spectator." 

"I can act a little," she said, demurely. "I was 
on the stage when I was younger." 

"I'm told you were fierce. Besides, this isn't 
acting. It's life. Nothing's worse than the actress 
who acts off the stage. You try acting with Cope 
and he'll know it before you get through your 
entrance speech." 

"That's true," she said, sobered. "I'll just try 
to feel it, and not to think it. We're almost there. 
Keep quiet a minute and I'll see if I can get the 
mood." 

1307] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED MIERICANS 

She reminded me of Mary Shaw taking a silent 
moment to hypnotize herself in the wings before 
going on for a tragic scene. I began to believe that 
there might be dramatic possibilities in Janet, 
after all. 

We arrived at Cope's door, quiet and preoccupied. 
She gave our names to the Japanese boy absent- 
mindedly. We waited in the reception hall in 
silence — the hall of a Spanish-American museum, 
full of rusty grillwork and mission bells and worm- 
eaten wooden saints. Janet sat in an inquisitorial 
chair, with an air of wrapt devotion, her head bowed. 
When the Japanese boy returned for us, she rose for 
her stage entrance and gave me an encouraging and 
protective smile. I followed her in. 

Cope was waiting for us at the far end of a studio- 
living-room as big as a church, in front of a fire- 
place that had been built in an alcove of bookshelves 
and fireside settles, very quaint and cozy. He looked 
like a monk in his long dressing gown and mediaeval 
slippers, standing to receive us, but still reading a 
manuscript, which he lowered to lay on the table 
as we approached. His eyes did not part with the 
page till Janet was near enough to begin some apol- 
ogy for intruding on him. Then he held out his 
hand, smiling hospitably, but without speaking, and 
looking from one to the other of us as she continued. 

By the time we were seated in the firelight she 
had explained that she and I had been discussing 
the film of *' Sappho" and that I had convinced her 

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it should have a happy ending. He watched her and 
listened to her, his gaze moving reflectively from her 
pink sweater to her rose-pink cap, and then down 
again to the pink flush of excitement that had over- 
spread her olive pallor. He seemed perhaps mildly 
puzzled. 

"You see," she explained, "as Sappho, I'll realize 
that Jean ought to marry and have children if he's 
ever to be happy — that he can't be happy with me 
in the sort of life we've been living, so I give him 
up to the girl he wants to marry; and then, after 
you've shown them on their honeymoon together, 
you show me sitting all alone, at a window or some- 
where, trying to smile bravely and thinking of him. 
I don't think that would be just hokum, do you.^^ 
I think it's true of lots of women. I know it is of 
me." She smiled at him, appealingly embarrassed, 
but determined to tell the truth. ^Td give up the 
man I loved, if I thought it would make him happier. 
I mean I would if I really loved him. I thmk that's 
what love is — real love." And then she shot an 
eloquently shy glance at me. And he understood. 

He understood the change in her and the cause 
of it. He understood that we were in love with each 
other. His eyes opened slowly, enlightened. And 
I felt myself begin to redden with guilt and em- 
barrassment. The little devil ! 

I took refuge in a search through my pockets for 
a cigarette. 

"He's gomg to help me with mother," she went 

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on. "You see, the way we plan the ending, I'll 
have just as good a part as ever — better, even — 
but if she's opposed to it, I'm going to stand out 
against her. I'll have to some day. I ought to 
have, long ago. And I would have if I'd had anyone 
to help me. All my life I've wanted to, though I'm 
so fond of her and owe her so much." She had 
begun to pick at the hem of her silk sweater, her 
eyes down. "You — you don't know how — how 
cruel a mother can be. And no one ever helps you 
against her. I — ^I couldn't make the fight alone. 
If anyone had helped me it might have been 
different." 

There were tears in her voice, and he was blinking 
at her, sincerely moved. I communed with my life- 
less cigarette and got no response from it. There 
was a match safe on a table back in the room. I 
trusted they would understand that I was going for 
a light. I rose as inconspicuously as possible and 
withdrew from the picture. 

And I did not return to it. I was too nervous. 
I had a sort of stage fright. I was sure that if I 
moved to rejoin them and caught Cope's eye, I 
should grin palely at him in a self-conscious con- 
fession that I was trying to play a part and knew 
I was doing it badly. I stood staring at the colored 
covers of some magazines on the table until I began 
to feel muscle-bound. Then I tiptoed from the 
stage to a bookcase in the wings, and pretended to 
be looking at the titles. 

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I glanced back, once, over my shoulder. She was 
getting along very well without me. Cope was 
sitting on the settle beside her and patting one of 
her hands, while she used her handkerchief with the 
other. I think I must have felt sorry for him; 
I know his books struck me as pathetic. 

They were book-agent sets of "universal" anthol- 
ogies, collections of cabinet specimens of the uni- 
verse's Best Literature, a row of universal history's 
Great Events (edited with paste pot and shears from 
all the uncopyrighted historians of the second-hand 
bookshops) the universe's Greatest Speeches and 
Most Famous Lives and most approved old mono- 
graphs of superseded Science; and beyond these 
was a ragtag of popular fiction evidently sent to 
him by literary agents who had moving-picture 
rights to sell. 

The books struck me as pathetic, and my own 
position before them struck me as absurd. I could 
neither take on my role again nor escape it. And 
what a role ! I had gone behind his back to tell his 
star what should be done with the end of his film. 
I had been making love to her. I had been setting 
her against her mother and obviously intriguing to 
gain a controlling influence over her, for some pur- 
pose of my own. I could foresee how Cope and 
Mamma Nast would get together, first thing in the 
morning, and prepare a little cup of necessary 
poison for me, and arrange a convincing story to 
tell Janet in order to account for my sudden de- 

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parture for another world. And I could foresee how 
Janet, as she listened to them, would bite a trem- 
bling, twisted under-lip — struggling to suppress a 
smile. 

"Where are you?" she called, at last. 

"I'm here," I answered unconvincingly. 

She must have divined, from my tone of voice, 
that she could get no aid from me. She finished her 
act alone, rose on a conspiring handclasp, and saun- 
tered toward me with Cope. "It's all right," she 
assured me, smiling with triumphant tenderness. 
"He thinks our ending is right and he's going to 
help me with mother." 

I muttered nothing intelligible. She slipped her 
arm through mine and swung me round, so that she 
might walk between us to the hall. "Don't come 
out with us," she cried, gaily, and dragged me away 
in a burst of high spirits, without waiting for the 
formal good-bys. " See you in the morning. Don't 
forget your promise." 

He waved to us, smiling with his lips, a look of 
jealous speculation in his eyes. 

She hurried to her car. "Home, please," she 
ordered. 

"What came over you?" she remonstrated, as 
we got in. 

"You little devil," I said, cornering her, "what 
made you pretend / was in love with you?" 

"Well," she said, "I pretended I was in love with 
you, didn't I?" 

1312] 



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And whoop ! She covered her face with her hands 
and began to laugh and to cry. "It's terrible and 
it's — it's perfectly ridiculous. He couldn't take his 
eyes off the pink. He — he hasn't looked at me like 
that for years. It's too funny! It's awful! He 
liked me the moment he saw me. I'm — I'm ashamed 
of myself. It's like trapping some animal. It's like 
being a decoy duck." She was sniffling and giggling 
together. "I can't love him if he's going to be so 
simple." 

"Don't you worry," I warned her. "He's not 
going to be simple. You've made him jealous of 
me. You've made him think I have some plan up 
my sleeve — that I'm intriguing to get control of 
you and your mother so as to sell you moving- 
picture rights, probably. When you see what he'll 
do to me, you'll not think he's simple." 

That sent her off into another hilarious choking 
fit. I had been "too funny"! I had looked "so 
queer"! What was I afraid of? He couldn't kill 
me, could he.^^ 

"All right," I said. "I don't care. I don't want 
to write any films, anyway. They bore me. But 
I don't want him to go out of his way to humiliate 
me publicly, and you can never tell what an egotist 
like that will do. I'll get my resignation ready to- 
night, and the first sign I see " 

"No, no. You mustn't. You've got to help me. 
You mustn't back out now. I can't do it alone. 
I don't know what to do 7iexV^ 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

"The first thing you'll do, if you want me to help 
you, you'll get it out of his crop that I'm in love 
with you." 

"What's the disgrace in that ? Lots of " 

"Never mind. And quit pretending that you're 
in love with me." 

"But I like you. I do, really." 

"No doubt. I appreciate my charm. But you'll 
kindly resist it. Otherwise, by this time to-morrow 
night I'll be climbing mountains on the Limited." 

"Very well." She sighed enormously. "All is 
over between us. Now what?" 

It was easier to ask than to answer. So much 
depended on her ability to manage her mother. 
And how did Mamma Nast feel toward Cope, and 
what had been the terms of their association in the 
past? And what was the honest truth of Janet's 
relations with him during all those years? 

She explained the last quite frankly. When she 
first began to work with Cope, she knew — she could 
tell from the way he looked at her — that he was — 
well, that he liked her. But Cope must have been 
aware that if her mother saw he was in love with 
Janet it would be the end of him; so he was very 
formal and discreet in his manner toward her. 
Naturally, Janet thought that cowardly of him. 
She despised it. She made herself feel that she 
despised him. She behaved to him with a studied 
and slighting indifference. 

Then, as their films succeeded, he became more 

[3U] 



VANCE COPE 



and more important in their partnership, so that 
her mother would have hesitated to break with him, 
even if she had known that he was in love with her 
daughter. But by that time Janet's attitude to 
him had become fixed. She was too proud to change 
it. She would not make any advances to him. She 
saw many repellent littlenesses in him, and she 
exaggerated them in her own eyes, so as to justify 
to herself her manner toward him. "I don't won- 
der," she said, "that he's been afraid of me." 

Did her mother realize, now, how important it 
was to keep him.f* 

"Yes," she said, "I think so. She's been very 
diplomatic about a lot of things lately. You see, 
we're not making so much money as we used to, 
and — though they don't tell me — I know they think 
it's because the public's tired of me. Everybody 
agrees that he's a great director. All the critics say 
so. But they're complaining that I'm *cold' ! — that 
I have no charm any more." 

She broke a little on that confession. I hurried 
her away from it. "Suppose you were to tell your 
mother that he's in love with Mary Merivale, and 
that he's likely to leave you because of this dispute 
about the end of 'Sappho,' and take Mary and make 
a star of her, would your mother help you to hold 
him?" 

*^I think so. She suspects what's the matter with 
him. She told me so this afternoon." 

"Well, then, what would she do if you told her 

21 [ 315 ] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

that you were in love with him and wanted to marry 
him?" 

"I don't know. She dislikes him. She thinks 
he's conceited and unmanly." 

"Those are the defects of his qualities." 

"I know. I understand him. But she doesn't." 

"Then you don't think it would be wise to tell 
her?" 

She hesitated. "No." 

"We're clear this far, then: you can tell her what 
the situation is between Cope and Mary and get her 
to help break it up. But you have to take Cope's 
side in a quarrel with her, in order to work the 
symbol of the cruel parent on him. I'm afraid of a 
real quarrel with your mother. Aren't you?" 

"Yes," she admitted. "I couldn't go through 
with it. I'm too fond of her." 

"That's what I feared. And she's too clever to 
be taken in by a pretense of a quarrel. That leaves 
only one chance. You'll have to get her to stage a 
quarrel with you and act the cruel and unnatural 
parent for Cope's benefit." 

"How can I get her to do that ? What reason can 
I give her?" 

The car had drawn up at her door. "I haven't 
the slightest idea," I said. "Good night." 

"But you can't!" she wailed. "You can't leave 
me like this. You've got to help me!" 

"You don't need any help," I assured her, sin- 
cerely. "You're much cleverer than I thought." 

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I backed out of the car in spite of her protests. 
"Say good night to your mother for me. And be 
kind to Cope." 

"Coward!" she shot at me. 

I waved my hat to her, as a white flag of eti- 
quette, and departed on the run. I had had enough 
amateur psychiatry for one day. 

11 

I might better have stayed. My curiosity kept 
me awake half the night, wondering what she would 
say to her mother, and how her mother would take 
it, and what they would decide to tell Cope, and 
how, for his part. Cope would proceed to handle 
my supposed affair with Janet. I was as obsessed 
by the situation as if it had developed in a story I 
was trying to write; and I dramatized the logical 
incidents of alternative plots unceasingly and to no 
convincing end. 

You know how the midnight-brain of insomnia 
magnifies its worries. I began to feel the social re- 
sponsibilities of influencing, or even trying to influ- 
ence, such important public characters. They were 
setting the standards of the nation in their films, 
and not merely standards of clothes and ways of 
living, but of manners and ambitions, of morals and 
ideals. If Cope and Janet Nast married happily, 
wouldn't they reflect their new view of life in more 
encouraging pictures of matrimony? What an effect 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

that might have on the American public who re- 
ceived from Cope, now, nothing but a cynical 
Broadway view of marriage! And shouldn't I be 
finally responsible for having caused the change? 

I was hugely vague about it. My thought moved 
in a large sleepy delusion of grandeur. I fancied 
myself rather as the Baron Stockmar of the situa- 
tion, arranging his pupil's marriage with Queen 
Victoria and foreseeing the million implications of 
what that marriage would mean to the Victorian 
period, with its ideal of royal respectability and the 
white flower of a blameless married life. 

I fell asleep feeling important. 

In the morning I woke to a pessimistic view of 
my effect on the world, because at the foot of the 
bed there were a little table covered with a face 
towel, a round black tray, a thick crockery water 
pitcher standing on its head, and an upended thick 
glass beside it. I knew, without looking, that the 
tray was decorated with an all-over design of gilt 
asterisks. For how many years, in how many 
American hotels, had I seen this unvarying bedside 
arrangement! Who had decreed it. ^^ No one. Who 
could change it.^^ No one. Wars might come, 
revolutions, earthquakes, panics, social and moral 
upheavals and volcanic change; but at the end of 
it all, if you walked into any of the bedrooms in any 
of these commercial hotels, you would still find the 
little black tray of gilt asterisks, the thick white 
crockery water pitcher on its head, the heavy drink- 

1318] 



VANCE COPE 



ing glass, the towel tablecover with the hotel name 
worked on it in red thread, and the inevitable bed- 
side table. The mystery of human habit ! The eter- 
nal inertia of human life 1 The incredible durability 
of unreasonable reality! In such a world, what 
difference would it make what Cope learned or 
taught about women or marriage or anything else? 
No difference whatever. None. Not a particle. 

In that mood I shaved myself. And why did I 
shave? Who had ordained that all American men 
should shave their faces, but not, like the Chinese, 
their heads? Why must I wear a collar and tie? 
Why must I put my watch in the left-hand pocket 
of my waistcoat and my small change in the right? 
Mysteries! Set and unalterable mysteries! I went 
downstairs to breakfast. Why must I have coffee 
for breakfast, grapefruit, bacon? Who could now 
change that American ideal of the morning meal? 
No mortal power. Yet people worried about the 
dangers of a bloody revolution if radical agitators 
continued to be agitated! And I had felt im- 
portant at the prospect of influencing the themes of 
Cope's moving pictures so as to correct their ill 
effect on the young American male mind ! 

I started out for the studio feeling a godlike 
superiority to myself and an exalted indifference to 
Cope and his love affairs; and when I arrived at the 
lot I saw it as trivial as an ant hill. The scenario 
department was in a ridiculous shack. They do 
not have to build against the weather in Los 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Angeles. They make a moving-picture office out of 
wall board and scantlings, as massive as a house of 
cards. I stood in front of the scenario department 
and blew at it, experimentally. I was not surprised 
to see the door fly open. I had expected to see the 
side of the wall cave in. 

The boy who had opened the door announced, 
"They want you in Mr. Cope's office." 

You cannot explain these moods to an office boy. 
I had to pretend that Cope was important, and go 
to see what he wanted. 

I went with indifference. And it was an indif- 
ference that insulated me and protected me from 
Cope. Any meeting with such a man is a dangerous 
confrontation. Sensitive artists of his type, who 
have come up out of a neglected childhood, arrive 
with an ego that is all pride and thin skin. In their 
fearful younger days they watched and studied 
everyone around them, apprehensively, not knowing 
from whom the next cruelty might come; conse- 
quently, they have the habit of being very alert and 
knowing and apparently intuitive in their human 
contacts. They penetrate you by an act of sym- 
pathetic imagination, and what they perceive that 
is dangerous to them their egotism marks with 
immediate alarm. They are always asking for 
comment on their art, and they are not to be de- 
ceived by servile praise; yet criticism can hardly 
be made so diplomatic that it will not offend them; 
and once their Napoleonic ego is offended, they are 

[320] 



VANCE COPE 



as Corsican as Napoleon in their pursuit of revenge. 
The theater is full of them — actors, writers, direc- 
tors, and producing managers. They make the 
production of a play an infuriating adventure in 
diplomacy. I went in to Cope with a long experi- 
ence of him in the back of my mind, under the 
immediate indifference. 

He had an office of green wicker furniture and 
green grass rugs, chintz curtains and cushions, 
flowers on his desk and sunlight in his windows, 
all very airy and summery and aesthetic. He was in 
light clothes and a polka-dot tie, and the tie struck 
me as significant. I had never seen him wear any- 
thing but a black cravat before. And he was cordial. 
Why? It was not the cordiality of condescension. 
It was friendly. 

He wanted to talk to me about the ending of 
"Sappho," he said. Of course, what he wanted to 
do was to warn me against going behind his au- 
thority to discuss his scenarios with any of his cast. 
"You have to be careful what you say to these 
people, they're so temperamental." I caught his 
assumption of our equal superiority to actors. 
"Fortunately, the ending you suggested falls in 
with my plans. And it's good — it's extremely 
good." 

He was more than friendly. He was treating me 
with respect. Undoubtedly! And I was alarmed. 
Why respect ? The picture producers in Los Angeles 
have an old feud with these "damn authors" who 

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are always complaining to the public that "we've 
spoiled their stuff.'* Why now, suddenly, respect? 

The tone of a carefully discreet reference to Janet 
Nast gave me the clue; in spite of his care, there 
was jealousy in his manner. Was he respectful 
because he thought I had succeeded in arousing 
some sentimental response in Janet, the forbidding, 
the unapproachable, the watched and guarded. 
The male animal of this sort is amusing. In his 
predacious eye, any love affair is a scalp on the belt, 
and here was a scalp indeed! Nasty Janie's! 

He had heard something of my criticism of her 
at luncheon, and he asked me what I had said. It 
was impossible to tell him. I could not offer him 
that theory of the subconscious mind in the movies. 
If he had never heard of it — which was likely — it 
would come to him as a criticism of his ignorance, 
and offend him. Besides, as an artistic egotist, he 
would be insulted by the idea that his pictures had 
been the product of anything but his sovereign 
directing intelligence. I compromised by explaining 
that I had criticized Janet Nast without knowing 
her, and that since meeting her I had changed my 
opinion. 

It was true, but not true in the way that he took 
it. He accepted it as indicating less a change of 
opinion than a change of heart. I let him. 

"You see," I said ingenuously, "I found that what 
I was criticizing in her was really the effect of her 
mother's tyranny. That's why I stirred her up to 

[322] 



VANCE COPE 



revolt." And I tried to explain to him how her feel- 
ing against her mother, repressed by her dutiful 
affection, came out in bitterness and dissatisfaction 
with everybody and everything except Mamma 
Nast. "You'll see a change in her," I predicted, 
"if we can get her emotional responses normal." 

He replied, with a straight face, "I see a change 
in her already." While he was replying, his desk 
phone rang. He swung around to take it, giving 
me his back and shoulders, and there was some- 
thing too sudden in the movement; it was as if he 
had ducked to hide a grin. As he listened, I saw his 
scalp move back on his head. He had evidently 
raised his eyebrows in some expression that he 
wished to hide from me, but his voice was merely 
formal. "Ask Miss Nast to come in." 

I rose to leave. "Don't go," he said. "We can 
discuss our new ending together." And the tone in 
which he said "our" was just a trifle off. 

He was enjoying some little game of superior 
acuteness with himself, and applauding it with a 
psychic chuckle. I nodded. I foresaw that my 
turn to chuckle might arrive with Janet. 

And it arrived. 

She burst in like an ingenue. "I've done it," she 
announced, excitedly, before she had closed the door. 

"Done what?" 

She made a dramatic gesture that said, "Wait a 
moment." She shut the door and came over to us, 
and stood swallowing, her lips twitching, as if she 

[ 323 1 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

were unable to speak for the exultation that caught 
in her throat. And then, unexpectedly, the twitch- 
ing became a pathetic trembling of the mouth, and 
she sat down, unable to speak. 

"What's the matter?" 

"I've quarreled with my mother," she said, in a 
painful voice. 

"About the picture?" 

She looked up at me through a bright film of 
tears. "About everything. I told her everything." 

"What did she say?" 

She shook her head blindly. "She's going away. 
For a little while. Now, you — you'll have to help 
me. Both of you." She appealed to Cope. "I 
don't know how to do a thing for myself. I quar- 
reled with her to get the picture done the way you 
want it, and you'll have to help me. You'll have 
to help me." 

We were both standing. Cope and I. He glanced 
at me. I looked past him, out the window, thought- 
fully. And as I moved away from her, in the 
direction of my gaze, he went to her and placed his 
hand on her shoulder. "Don't be afraid," he said, 
very deep in the throat. "We'll take care of you. 
What has happened?" 

She confided her whole story to him. She had 
told her mother that the end of "Sappho" had to 
to be played as he wished, and their argument about 
it had led to her declaration that she could no longer 
submit to her mother's control. She was not a 

[324] 



VANCE COPE 



child. She had a mind of her own, and she was 
determined to have a life of her own. She must 
have her own bank account and her own check book. 
She must be free to go and come as she pleased, with- 
out her mother's chaperonage. Mamma Nast might 
administer as she pleased her third interest in the 
film company, but Janet's interest was to be in her 
own hands; and whenever she agreed with Cope 
she would vote with him. And so forth. 

She was very convincing to anyone who believed 
her, but I remained skeptical. She was wearing a 
frock with one of those boat-shaped necks that slip 
down on the shoulder. It had slipped far enough to 
expose a shoulder ribbon. And the ribbon was pink. 

Cope seemed to have no suspicion. He comforted 
and reassured her, quite sincerely. It would all come 
out right in the end. Her mother might be angry 
for the moment, but that would pass. Work in the 
studio would be very much easier for everybody if 
Janet were free to use her own mind and have her 
own way. 

She listened to him, full of girlish emotion, her 
eyes moist and grateful, very sweet to see. And she 
lifted her gaze to him with that flattering air of 
sitting at his feet which any man not blinded by his 
own egotism might well distrust. He liked it. He 
smiled and cheered her. There began to be a note 
of gratified authority in his consolations. 

"Well," he said, at last, "they're waiting for us 
on the set." He gave her a final pat on the pink 

[325] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED .\:MERICANS 

shoulder strap, and went back to his desk. He took 
up some papers and put them in his breast pocket 
with the air of one in complete command. 

She rose dutifully. 

*'Can you join me here," he asked, "after lunch- 
eon, to go over the new ending?" 

He did not ask me. 

She said, "Yes," and glanced toward me specu- 
latively. 

I was crossing to my chair to get my hat. She 
smiled at me with an abrupt brilliancy and I knew 
some devilment was coming. "I didn't tell her," 
she said to me, shyly, "about — you know — what we 
were talking about." 

Cope became suddenly motionless, pretending to 
read a letter that lay on his blotter. 

It seemed to me that he deserved a little jolt. I 
imitated her confiding accent. "Why should you," I 
insinuated, " if you're to be free to live your own life.''" 

The sHghtest flicker of an eyelid showed that she 
understood the aim of that shaft. Cope raised his 
head slowly and stared at us like a deer in covert. 

"I'll owe it all to you," she said, "if it turns out 
happily." 

I got my back to him, escorting her out. "All I 
ask is to see you happy." 

We went out without waiting for him, and started 
do\Mi the long hall. She had begun to cough and 
redden. 

"Don't laugh," I pleaded. "It's my funeral. 

[326] 



VANCE COPE 



He'll never let you get rid of your mother only to see 
you fall for me." 

She caught my arm, staggering. 

"If he sees you laughing," I warned her, "it '11 
ruin everything." 

"If I don't laugh," she gasped, "I'll choke." 

"Well," I said, "I'm glad it's not me you're pur- 
suing. I couldn't wish him a worse fate. How can 
you laugh at the man you're going to marry .f^" 

"Oh dear!" She caught a long sobering breath. 
"He's such a simp, isn't he? He's so — so trans- 
parent. I think that's why I like him. I wouldn't 
dare marry a man I couldn't laugh at. Let's wait 
here for him." 

We were at an angle of the hall where it turned to 
go out to the stages. We looked back to see Cope 
coming. "Tell me," I said. "You didn't really 
quarrel with your mother." 

She shook her head, smiling. "She's all right. 
She's a good sport. She's helping me." 

I waved her off. "You're too much for me. Good- 
by. Cope was right to be afraid of you. Delilah!" 

She replied, leaning to me in a charming burlesque 
of seductiveness : "Philistine ! Shall I sell my Samson 
to you?" And I fled. 

12 

Something that had happened among us inspired 
Cope to a fit of furious application to his work. It 
may have been the feeling of freedom from ^lanima 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Nast's interference and the desire to make good use 
of that liberty while it lasted. Or the rowel of 
jealousy may have spurred him on to show Janet 
what an artist he could be. Or he may have felt 
the need of maximating his ego in my eyes — and 
Mary Merivale's. In any case, even granting all 
four aims, he succeeded, to my knowledge, in at 
least three. He made a masterpiece of his fancy 
dress ball, he made Janet proud of him, and he con- 
vinced me that he was something of a genius. 

He had already taken several long shots of his 
dancers in the mass, and I supposed that he intended 
to let these suffice, as a lazy reporter would be satis- 
fied to describe such a scene in meaningless gen- 
eralities. Not so. He began now to build up his 
picture on the screen with little individual incidents 
of the dance and interesting close-ups of the dancers. 
He began to get laughing groups that had much of 
the rollicking robustiousness of Franz Hals. He 
seized on commonplace-looking characters, changed 
them, rehearsed them, vivified them with his im- 
agination, and individualized them in illuminating 
bits of action that were as real and personal as life 
itself. He plucked out of the crowd a conventional 
clown, painted his eyes in blind black hollows, 
widened his mouth in a melancholy black droop, 
lengthened his white sleeves till they hung six inches 
over his hands like the sleeves of a scarecrow — or a 
shroud — and then took this grotesque and drooping 
figure of bizarre tragedy and carried him as a grin- 

[328] 



VANCE COPE 



ning death's head through all the wildest passages 
of Bohemian jollity. He succeeded in composing a 
masquerade ball that was really spirited and bac- 
chanalian and not humanly incredible. And he 
devised a new meeting between Jean and Sappho, 
with the prophetic clown watching them through the 
fronds of a potted palm, and made the scene as 
idyllically sinister as a first meeting between Adam 
and Eve with the serpent spying. 

He drove himself and everybody else unmerci- 
fully, possessed by his ideas and determined to 
realize them; but he worked quietly, slowly, 
absorbed and careful, without pose and without 
self -consciousness. He had not the sort of ego that 
shouts and tramples. He was patient. He was 
diplomatic. He knew exactly what he wanted; he 
knew that it was worth getting; and he got it. 

He did not let them stop for luncheon. They sent 
out for sandwiches and drank soft drinks out of pop 
bottles between scenes. Late in the afternoon I came 
down from the musicians' gallery over the ballroom, 
where I had been watching, too interested to think 
of food, and begged a crust from Janet Nast. 

She was triumphant. "How much am I bid for 
Samson now.^^" she crowed. 

"No doubt of it," I admitted. "He's a whale." 

"You don't know the half of it. Wait till you see 
some of these bits in the projection room. I'm going 
to see them with him." 

"Have you been doing that in the past?" 

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SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

She shook her head. 

"Then keep away from it. He'll never let you 
or anyone else share in his work. Don't make that 
mistake. It's mother's child. Whether it's good or 
bad, it's his, and he'll have no one influencing it. 
How's he getting on with Mary Merivale.^*" 

"He never notices any of us when he's like 
this," she complained. 

"Not consciously, no; but if you want to influence 
him without his being aware of how you're doing it, 
now's the time to get in your dirty work." 

"If you don't stop speaking of it in those terms, 
I'll stop talking to you at all." 

"I'll watch you," I said, going back to my gallery. 

We were on that scene for three days more before 
Cope, satisfied that he had done his best, gave the 
order to pay off the extra people and scrap the ball- 
room set. By that time all the studio staff had 
noticed the change in Nasty Janie. They attributed 
it to her mother's absence. Mamma Nast, it was 
reported, had gone to New York on a business trip, 
and they all shared in the feeling of release which 
seemed to show so prettily in Janet. She had be- 
come quite friendly and pleasant with everybody. 
She did not overdo it. She let it grow on them by 
patient, slow degrees. She allowed Billy to make 
a public capture of her heart, and then Billy's sister. 
She took them into her bungalow dressing-room and 
shared her lunches with them. She invited them to 
visit her in her Beverly Hills house, pleading that she 

[330] 



VANCE COPE 



was lonely while her mother was away. She won Billy 
very easily with a Shetland pony. She won Mary 
with a detailed plan for putting Billy in her next 
picture. They became an indissoluble trio, and Cope 
had to talk to Mary under Janet's eye or not at all. 

It was the custom in Cope's studio to dye in a 
tint of blue all the white materials in a scene, so as 
to tone down the harsh glare of white in the photo- 
graph. Janet asked that the materials in her scenes 
should be dyed pink, and this — though it would have 
been taken as a typical Nast interference in the 
past — was accepted by the staff without unfriendly 
comment. Pink would serve the purpose as well as 
blue; she liked pink; blue depressed her. That 
was enough. They were glad to keep her amiable 
and happy, if pink would do it. 

So it happened that when they came to do the 
sequence in which Sappho relinquished Jean and 
sent him to his fiancee, the set was a pink boudoir, 
and Janet arrived to play the scenes in a pink 
negligee. And it was not only Cope who blinked 
and stared. "Gosh! boy," one of the camera men 
muttered, "lead me to that baby doll." 

She looked as sweet and fragile and innocent as a 
candy stick. Billy came with her, solemnly holding 
her hand, and she was twittering down to him 
like a young mother. Mary Merivale walked 
behind them as proud as a nurse maid. I thought to 
myself: "This will be a Sunday-school chromo of 
Sappho, and no mistake! 

22 [ 331 ] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

Not so. When they began rehearsing the scene, 
she took on a maternal, sacrificial mood that lifted 
her out of mere prettiness. Her face was frankly 
distorted with suffering. Instead of caressing her 
lover she fumbled at him painfully with numb hands. 
Her stony suppression of tears choked the heart in 
you. Tears would have been a relief. You felt like 
pleading, "For Heaven's sake, let her cry!" But 
no. Even when her lover had gone and she stood 
looking out the window after him, her teeth chat- 
tered, but she did not break. And the way she tried 
to put up her shaking hand to cover the quivering 
of that wound of a mouth ! 

Cope, beside himself with tearful delight, kept 
pleading: "Don't lose it! It's wonderful! Do it 
just like that ! Camera ! " 

At first, he must have thought it was just a 
miraculous accident — as we all did. He must have 
been afraid that she could not repeat it — as we all 
were. But she took a long, hypnotized look at him 
each time, as if she were drawing her inspiration 
from his emotional response, and did it over and 
over, bit by bit, again and again, whether they 
wanted it for medium shots or close-ups. She got 
all of us excited and keyed up. The whole staff 
watched and worked in an intense, respectful 
silence. Cope, haggard and worn from his week of 
intensity, his nerves on edge, his voice husky, sat 
down after her last sequence was taken, put his face 
in his hands, and wept with relief. 

[ 332 ] 



VANCE COPE 



She ran to him, alarmed, and knelt beside his chair. 
"Don't do that," she said. "You've been working 
too hard. You mustn't! Please! Please don't!" 

He took her hand and crushed it. "You — ^you're 
wonderful," he sobbed. 

She signaled to the others to go away, shaking 
her head at them. As we withdrew, touched and 
tearful, she was helping him to his feet and taking 
him to her dressing room. 

IS 

It seemed to me that something more serious 
than a nervous breakdown had happened to Cope; 
and I went to the studio, next morning, prepared to 
hear important news. There was nothing in the 
scenario department but talk about Janet's sudden 
blooming as a tragedienne. They were all enthusias- 
tic. They had all been won by her. They loaded 
upon her absent mother the enmity which Janet 
had put off, and they blamed Mamma Nast for 
everything that had been unpleasant in Janet's 
past, including her arrested development as an 
actress. They agreed that if Cope had had a free 
hand with her earlier she would long ago have been 
the Duse and the Bernhardt of the screen. 

In the midst of the discussion we were summoned 
to an editorial conference with Cope. We went 
eagerly and we were cordially received. He was in 
high spirits. In the confusion of our general arrival 

[333] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

he did not reply specifically to my greeting; and, 
remembering his passage with Cuthbert Anderson, 
I repeated my good morning, for fear he might not 
go on with the business in hand unless I spoke to 
him first. He ignored me pointedly. I wondered if 
it could be possible that he and Janet 

He wished, he said, to propose a new ending for 
"Sappho." 

It had been planned that, after the scenes in 
which Jean was pictured as happy with his bride, the 
film should end by showing Sappho serving as an 
army nurse on the battlefield, with a subtitle specify- 
ing that she had been ennobled, not to say can- 
onized, by the "supreme sacrifice." That had 
been thoroughly satisfactory to the scenarists. 
They had a cheerful suspicion that it was being 
planned during Mamma Nast's absence, against 
her will; and they looked forward gleefully to a 
battle between Cope and her when she returned. 
But now Cope proposed a new twist. He still 
wanted Sappho to give Jean up. Yes. And Jean 
was to go to his fiancee. Yes. But after a se- 
quence that should show Jean miserable in the 
midst of the family's preparations for his wedding, 
the story ought to jump back to Sappho deserted 
at her window, and up the garden path to her, who 
is it she sees coming but Jean! He has returned 
to her. He can't be happy without her. Forgive- 
ness — reconciliation — a hurried wedding — and off 
they go together to America and a new life. 

[334] 



VANCE COPE 



I did not offer any comment. I knew that it 
would be ignored and I knew why it would be 
ignored. I withdrew from the conference as tact- 
fully as the situation permitted, and hunted up 
Janet in her dressing room. 

"Congratulations," I said. "You'll not need 
to use the blond wig." 

She looked startled, 

"Don't you know you've won him?" 

She stopped me with a " Ssh ! " Her maid was in the 
room. She whispered, smiling : "It's a secret, yet." 

"Fine!" We shook hands, victorious. "I'm 
sure you'll be happy. And now good-by!" 

"Good-by? Aren't you going to stay and do a 
scenario for me?" 

"No," I said, "I think not. I've been studying 
the way scenarios are written, and I don't think I'd 
be a success at it. It's a very difficult art. Very 
difficult. The personal equation enters into it too 
much for me." 

"I'll help you with — with Samson — if that's 
what you mean." 

"No. No, don't. And keep him out of the hands 
of the other Philistines. I'm going to say good-by 
to him. Give him a kiss for me. He deserves it." 

He was polite and sympathetic, but he did not 
try to persuade me to stay. We parted coldly. I 
went back to my hotel to pack, and Gadkin heard 
the news of my recession with a gratified pessimism. 

[335] 



SOME DISTINGUISHED AMERICANS 

"I told you," he said. "He's done. No body 
can work with that four-flush. He's got nothing 
but conceit. Nothing!" 

I wanted to tell Gadkin that, as a matter of fact, 
Cope was just beginning, but I felt that the state- 
ment would be too difficult to support — unless I 
predicted his marriage and the change that has 
since come over the spirit of his films. If that 
change was not apparent enough in the ending of 
the "Sappho" picture, it must have been convinc- 
ingly plain even to Gadkin in its successor. 

"Never!" said the Publicity blurb. "Never! 
Never in the history of American art has such a 
symphony of mother love and wifely devotion been 
played upon the heart-strings of the world of 
theatergoers. See Janet Nast and weep with glad- 
ness. See Mary Merivale and smile through your 
tears." 

I should like to know how their marriage is suc- 
ceeding and how they get on with Mamma Nast; 
but the climate of southern California is so balmy 
that no one will write you a letter; the Copes have 
not been involved in the scandal of any Hollywood 
murders, so there is nothing about them in the 
newspapers; and you can't believe what you see 
in the motion-picture magazines. Read what they 
tell you about how scenarios are written ! 

THE END 



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